Chris Pierson - Spirit of the Wind

While the Flight was going on, the rest of the city was far from idle. Kender filled the streets, not with their usual aimless bustle but with a singular reason: to prepare the trap that would catch and kill the Black-Gazer and his horde. Walls were erected, holes dug, and wood and stone carried back and forth. At the town’s edge, teams of kender armed with chisels and picks chipped away at the city walls themselves, weakening the stone and mortar. It could have been a grim business, preparing the city for its destruction, but the kender enjoyed themselves, singing and humming as bit by bit they crafted a purpose from the meaningless tangle of Kendermore’s streets.

On the day after Yule-a holiday the kender completely forgot about as they sought to prepare the defenses and flee the city-Riverwind and Paxina toured Kendermore, inspecting the work the kender had done. As they walked through the courtyards just inside the city walls, they had to thread their way carefully among the many places where the kender had pried up the cobblestones and were excavating earth beneath. The clatter of shovels rang all around them, and a constant flow of wheelbarrows hauled dirt away into the city.

“Where are they taking all the earth?” Riverwind asked, pausing in the middle of the courtyard to take it all in. There were hundreds of holes, all around them. It looked as if a colony of giant moles had invaded the town.

“All over the place,” Paxina answered. “The bricklayers and stonemasons need mortar, and it turns out whatever Malystryx has done to the soil makes it perfect for that.”

They continued to pick their way through the hole-riddled courtyard until they reached a place where the diggers had finished working. Here and there, kender sat around smoldering braziers, whittling wooden stakes into spears and setting them among the flames to harden. Runners moved from fire to fire, gathering armloads of finished stakes and carrying them down ladders into the many holes in the cobbles. Riverwind glanced into a pit and saw that its earthen floor, some fifteen feet down, was lined with dozens of stakes. Such deadfalls were an old trick, used by hunters all over Krynn. Many years ago, when he’d been a shepherd, Riverwind had dug them himself to protect his flock when hunger drove wolves and other predators down from the hills to the east of Que-Shu.

“They’ve finished covering them over there,” Paxina stated, pointing ahead. At the far end of the courtyard, there was no sign whatsoever that the ground was riddled with pits. To Riverwind, it looked like nothing but an ordinary, stone-paved plaza.

“How did you get the cobblestones to stay up?” he asked.

The Lord Mayor grinned. “Good question. Come over here.” She hurried ahead, making her way over toward the deceptively normal-looking part of the courtyard. When she reached its edge, she tapped her hoopak against the ground a few times, until one cobblestone answered with a hollow clack. She bent down and lifted it up, revealing a lattice of wood and rope that hung above a yawning, spiked pit. “Strong enough to keep the stones up,” she declared, “and it’ll hold a kender’s weight, too-maybe even an ogre or two. But try charging a whole bunch across…” She shrugged, grinning impishly as she slid the stone back into place.

They went on, pausing briefly when they reached a place where the kender were busily hewing at a span of the wall. Riverwind marveled at the workers’ precision. They had chipped away so much stone, it looked like the wall might crash down upon them if anyone sneezed. Despite its apparent fragility, however, sentries and archers still paced the battlements, watching the woods with a wary eye.

As he regarded the wall, Riverwind started to chuckle. Paxina looked at him questioningly. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

The old Plainsman gestured at the wall. “I just had a vision of how surprised they’ll be when this comes down,” he said. “In most sieges, it’s crews of sappers on the other side who try to weaken the walls.”

“True,” Paxina said with a grin. “Come on, let’s head into the city. There’s a few more things I want to show you.”

They walked down a narrow, winding avenue, stopping every now and then to walk around places where the kender were digging more pits in the middle of the road. Bricklayers worked at certain intersections, hurriedly building walls to block off side streets. “It all leads into the middle of town, just like we planned,” Paxina explained.

“Like a spider’s web,” Riverwind said, nodding with approval. “Once they get in…”

“They’re going to have an awful time getting out again,” the Lord Mayor finished. Suddenly, she grabbed his arm. “Watch it!”

Riverwind stopped and looked down. Stretched across the street right in front of him was a strong, thin cord.

“Trip wire,” Paxina explained. “You’ve got to watch very carefully where you walk around here.”

The old Plainsman stared at the nearly invisible wire. There was no way the ogres would see it when they came charging through. “What’s it connected to?” he asked.

“This one? Nothing,” Paxina answered. “Doesn’t need to be. See, the front wave of ogres come barreling down the street, and they hit this. Boom, they go down.”

“And the ones behind trample them,” Riverwind said, nodding.

“You got it. Of course, there are trip wires on other streets that are connected to things. Believe me-you don’t want to set off those. Here you would have fallen, no big deal. Hit one of the others, and… well, it wouldn’t be pretty Come on,” she said, beckoning him forward.

Carefully, Riverwind stepped over the trip wire. Walking more slowly, his eyes never leaving the ground before his feet, he followed the Lord Mayor farther down Greentwig Avenue. At last, they came to a dead end. A wall, twenty feet high, stretched across the middle of the road between two four-storey rowhouses. Riverwind stared at the blank, forbidding edifices surrounding him, then looked back the way they’d come.

“I thought you said every street led to the center of town,” he said.

“Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration,” Paxina replied. “Actually, a few of them end up like this. Look up.”

Riverwind followed the kender’s pointing finger and regarded the roofs of the buildings. He was silent for a moment, then lowered his gaze back to Paxina. “There’s nothing up there,” he said.

“Not now, there isn’t,” the Lord Mayor replied. “Not much point until the attack comes. But when the ogres come down this street, those rooftops will be covered with kender.”

“An ambush?”

“Yup. We’ve got them all over town.”

Riverwind stared thoughtfully up at the rooftops, a smile spreading across his face. Then Paxina led him back down Greentwig, around a corner, and along another street with the unlikely name of Furrynose. Along both sides of the street, kender were busy tearing the houses apart. They threw bricks and boards onto carts, which other kender hauled away. Most of the buildings had been stripped bare, with only a skeletal frameworks left; others lacked even that, and nothing remained but foundations and fronts.

“There’s streets like this one all over town, too!” Paxina shouted above the din. “We’re taking the materials and using them in other places.”

They moved on, turning off Furrynose onto Elbowpoke Way, where Riverwind stopped short. Ahead, dozens of small catapults, the same devices the kender used for target practice with their hoopaks, lined the street. Instead of clay discs, however, the catapults were loaded with small straw dummies. As Riverwind watched, the arms of several catapults sprang forward, hurling their payloads into the air. The dummies flew surprisingly far, soaring over walls and landing on rooftops.