Conundrum

Chapter
28

There are few things in this or any world that so cut against the kender grain as work when there is fun to be had. Razmous had spent three interminable weeks fulfilling his duties as chief acquisitions officer, leading expeditions through the ruins in search of iron to repair the Indestructible. As interesting as exploring a ruined city might sound at first, after thirty or so collection “missions,” he was ready to put his head in a UAEP tube and explode. Once he got over the really, really big architecture and saw his two thousandth forest of stone columns, there wasn’t much to it.

To really put the beard on the dwarf, Commodore Brigg had absolutely and irrevocably forbidden him, under any circumstances, unto perpetuity, to search for the giants” lair. It wasn’t that he wanted to see a giant, in particular. He just wanted to do something.

The others were all cheerfully busy at their individual tasks. Doctor Bothy continued to search for a cure to his hiccoughs, which had not abated in three weeks. Conundrum and Commodore Brigg were helping the professor modify one of the ascending kettles so that it could be lowered by means of a wench attached to the stern of the Indestructible, down through the hole at the bottom of the flooded portion of the cavern. They wanted to see if it really was bottomless, or a way to the Abyss, or to the other side of Krynn, or a possible way out. They had renamed the ascending kettle for this purpose, calling it a diving bell. This interested the kender for a while, until Commodore Brigg refused to allow him to be the first to go down in the bell. As the most qualified scientist, the professor was going to hazard the journey himself.

Sir Tanar was busy doing whatever it was that wizards did. This seemed to consist of standing around looking surly and aloof, of else poking around in dark places when he thought he wasn’t being followed, searching for secret passages leading to fabulous treasures, of which there apparently were none. Captain Hawser and Chief Portlost were busy with the mechanical crab, stripping its hull for parts for the Indestructible or effecting repairs to the ship. By the end of the three weeks, the crab was little more than a naked skeleton, though it still contained most of its mechanical components and could be operated as usual.

This left only Sir Grumdish to provide a measure of amusement for the kender, but he spent most of his days holed up inside his armor, sulking because the mechanical crab was so much more spectacular than his own humble mechanical armor. It had quite taken the joy out of his attempt to become a Knight. Razmous had spent the better part of a day begging him to go on a long explore, but to no avail. The next day, Sir Grumdish dismantled his armor and flung the pieces in a corner. He spent the remainder of the third week sitting atop the base of a fallen marble column, staring at a blank cracked wall.

After three weeks, Commodore Brigg finally released Razmous from his duties. They had all the iron they needed to complete their repairs, the Indestructible was once more afloat-with the addition of the boom and wench and the diving bell hanging from its end. With the gnomes no longer shouting, “Razmous, more iron! Razmous, find something a little bigger next time!” every two turns of the glass, the kender was finally able to slip away alone for a little private investigation. He had seen some promising ruins during his iron-mongering expeditions. One thing that Captain Hawser said in their first encounter stuck in his mind, rolling round and round like a pebble in a barrel, endlessly repeating until it had become a little chant, the first verse in a kender traveling song. A passage linking the city with Charynsanth’s lair.

It called to the kender like the smell of honey to a bear.

The perfect time to search for the passage was, of course, while the geysers were venting. All the gnomes would be hiding underground, and he could slip away unnoticed. He might even run into a giant by accident in the fog, and he was pretty certain it wasn’t breaking the rules if you just happened across a giant.

As he crept down a deserted, fog-shrouded street, he paused at a corner to consult a map by the light of a nearby lava pool. Warm sweat dripped from his forehead down his pointed” nose and onto the parchment covered with his own cartographical scrawls. During his search for iron parts to repair the Indestructible, he had made careful observations of his surroundings and committed them to maps. Marked in red on these maps were those places he most wanted to explore, in green those places he sort of wanted to explore, and in blue those places Sir Tanar had already explored (with Razmous secretly following him), but which still contained interesting nooks and crannies that the wizard had probably overlooked.

It was toward one of these places in blue ink that he was heading, since it was nearest the ship. It was a pile of rubble cast up against the dressed stone wall of the cavern. Sir Tanar had poked around in it for a while, probably hoping to find dead bodies or some other nasty thing to use in his spells. Razmous didn’t believe that it contained anything of that sort, though if it did, it certainly would be interesting. Instead, he believed it might cover an entrance or possibly even an exit.

Satisfied that he was on the right track, Razmous continued on his way, arriving a few minutes later at the site. It appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rubble extending more than halfway across the broad avenue, heaped up to a height of forty or fifty feet against the wall.

He avoided the loose piles of stone at the edges and went straight for the larger boulders nearer the wall. By turning sidewise and rearranging his pouches, he was able to slip between a promising pair and found himself, after a tight squeeze and a scramble over some loose gravel, in a long, tube-shaped cavern bearded with long pointed stalactites and prickled with short, stumpy stalagmites. The nearest of these looked to have been worn down to little more than a nub of its former self, and it appeared to have been blackened by fire. The far end of the tunnel, though hazy with smoke, was lit by a flickering blood-red glow.

Smiling, Razmous strode forward, and painfully stubbed his toes against the skull of some gigantic, ugly humanoid. Its heavy brow thrust out over a flattened, crooked nose and large, misshapen mouth filled with a hideous snarl of yellow teeth, some of which had fallen out. The skull was nearly as large as the kender and twice as heavy. Nearby lay a rib cage large enough to hold a bear. Razmous crawled inside, sat down, removed his boot, and massaged his bruised piggies. A reddish gleam near the wall caught his eye, and brushing aside some ancient cobwebs, he removed a large, dry, dusty crimson scale. He examined it for a moment before dropping it into one of his pouches, slipping his foot into his boot, and continuing on his way.

The cavern was much longer than he’d imagined. By the time he reached the farther end, Razmous was dusty, bedraggled, and thoroughly exhausted. His topknot hung like a limp rag over his nose, stray strands of hair clinging to his parched lips and the gummy corners of his eyes.

Yet he didn’t mind, not at all. The trip had been worth every scraped shinbone, crushed toe, and skinned knuckle, for below him, at the base of a long broad slope, lay the red dragon.

Reorx’s Black Boots! What a dragon. Razmous had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting, “How do you do?” He’d seen the dragon for only a few moments three weeks ago when it attacked them: once as it breathed fire on two of his companions-that had been interesting, though very sad-and once as it peered through the portholes of the ship. Of course, in both cases, he’d only caught a glimpse. Now, the dragon lay stretched out on a bed of gold and steel coins, snoozing like a cat before a warm hearth.

Even farther below lay the lake of fire, and in its midst was the island where the dragon’s egg still lay atop its comparatively smaller pile of treasure. The dragon’s lair was high up near the cavern’s roof, where it could keep watch over its egg. Razmous noted the cleverness of this plan, nodding in appreciation of how exposed and vulnerable they had been when approaching the egg.

His eyes flickered back to the dragon and drank in the sight, burning it into his memory so that he could sit before a fire some day and tell others of what he had seen. Razmous was rather young for a kender, only being twenty years or so into his wanderlust-the peculiar urge to see the world firsthand that most kender begin to feel in their early twenties. Being so young, he had little memory of how things were before the coming of the great dragons and the subsequent Dragon Purge. He could count on two fingers the dragons he had seen before this one-Malys, whom he had glimpsed only from a distance, and Pyrothraxus, whom he had seen up close and personal during his visits to Mount Nevermind. But even Pyrothraxus, who was much smaller than Malys, dwarfed this dragon by many wingspans. This dragon was a house cat to Pyrothraxus’s tiger. Nevertheless, Razmous could not help but be overcome by the majesty and beauty of the red creature. Even though it was evil. Very evil.

The unimaginable wealth that lay all about the dragon caught his eye. He could not suppress a sigh, fingering the gold in his mind, already seeming to feel the weight of it dragging at the straps of his pouches. It wasn’t some kind of dwarven greediness that he felt, kindled by the sight of all that wealth. It was the desire to be able to slap down a coin on a bar, hitch his thumbs behind his suspenders-he’d have to start wearing suspenders first-and tell everyone that the coin came from a dragon’s lair.

It wasn’t like he was going to steal it from the dragon, Razmous reasoned. He’d return it someday. Now that he knew where he could find a dragon, he imagined he’d come back many times just to look at it. He could return the coins then, after he was finished telling everyone who would listen about the time he borrowed a pouch full of coins from a dragon. Yes, that was it! That was it perfectly. There couldn’t be a better plan. He’d just slip down there, he thought as he started down the slope, moving as quietly as only a kender can move. Slip down there and…

Of course, this white-hot pain shooting through his back wasn’t part of the plan, nor his knees betraying him and going off in different directions. He fell heavily on his rump, then toppled over on his face. Some of the precious things in his pouches spilled out on the stone floor, and the rounder objects-a silver salt shaker from the Sailor’s Rest in Flotsam (how had that got in there?), a small steel coin with a hole punched through the middle for a string, a spool of green thread-rolled down the slope, picking up speed and noise as they neared the dragon.

Slowly, one of the dragon’s great heavy eyelids lifted and stared at the three tiny round intruders as they rolled to a stop at the edge of its treasure bed.

Meanwhile, Razmous was struggling with his rudely uncooperative arms. His head was grinding his nose into the stone floor, but he could not lift himself off it. His arms lay spread to either side, as lifeless as sausage. Finally, he managed to roll himself over, and, strangely, found Sir Tanar standing over him.

“Oh, Shir Tanner,” he said drunkenly. “Clad you arth ’ere. I canned seemb to move by armbs. Whathz thad in your hanth? A dagger?”

Charynsanth lurched up on her bed of treasure upon hearing the commotion and spying the gray-robed mage. Seeing the writhing creature at his feet and the bloody dagger in the wizard’s hand, she stayed her first impulse-to blast them both with dragonfire. But she did not spare the Thorn Knight the full onslaught of her dragonfear. It rolled out in waves, lashing his spirit, and he staggered back under the assault, but gamely he held his ground.

“What do you want here, human?” she asked, half in admiration of his bravado.

“I have slain the thief come to rob you of your treasures,” Sir Tanar answered. He was thankful that his voice did not tremble, for in the face of this dragon, he dared not show fear.

“Thief?” Razmous said weakly. He blinked up at the Thorn Knight. “Oh, good zhob. Now where wuz I?” His eyes closed again, and his face grew paler as the pool of blood grew wider around his outstretched body.

The Thorn Knight continued, “We serve the same mistress, you and I."

“Takhisis is gone!” the dragon roared. “I serve no one but myself.”

“Be that as it may, I have been in contact with my Mistress, and it was she who suggested I make an alliance with you,” Sir Tanar ventured. “She knows you of old. She was, in fact, surprised that you are still alive. She has not heard your name spoken for many a year, not since the Dragon Purge began.”

Charynsanth’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing. She had fled here at the beginning of the Purge, after her mate was slain by the green dragon Beryl.

“We can help each other, you and I,” Tanar continued, feeling more confident. “I’ve killed this thief, and I know of your war with the giants. I can tell you of a way to get into the giant’s city, O mighty Charynsanth.”

“You were with those miserable little interlopers before,” she hissed. “I saw you go onboard their little ship after I roasted those two. They were small, barely more than a mouthful after I finished cooking them.”

“There are enough left over to satisfy even your appetite,” Sir Tanar said.

She purred, chuckling, the fires in her belly spouting from her nostrils. “And I after I kill them, what do you get?” Charynsanth asked.

“Their ship,” he answered. “Nothing more. Just their ship, and a few members of the crew to operate it. The city, the giants, and their treasure I leave to you.”

He did not mention that he needed the ship and her crew to find the entrance to the Abyss, nor that he planned to escape in the ship while Charynsanth was busy with the giants. Still, something in her eyes told him that she suspected as much.

“How very wise of you,” the dragon said, but her tone was sarcastic, as if she divined his motives.

“I’ll come tomorrow to tell you the way,” Sir Tanar said, his voice shaking, “and I’ll bring a morsel to whet your appetite.” With these words, he turned and strode away, swallowing the ball of steel wool that had formed in his throat.

Charynsanth pulled herself up the slope to watch him go, her massive ivory claws digging into the stone. She paused over the outstretched form of the kender, sniffing at him hungrily. He was barely enough even to take the trouble to swallow, but at least he was warm and juicy, not burned to a crisp.

As she hovered over him, Razmous’s eyes opened a slit. “Oh, hello,” he whispered. “My name izh Razhmouf Pingepogget. Are you going to defour me?”

“I thought I might,” the dragon answered with begrudging admiration, almost pity for this miserable wretch who had been treacherously stabbed in the back by what was probably his companion, if not his friend. That wizard would be one to watch, she thought. He might try the same with me.

“Oh, good,” Razmous sighed sleepily. “Do hurry, “fore I fall azleeb. I doan wanna mizh thizh.”