Brian Murphy - The Search For Magic

“What! Why?”

Raegel looked at Mixun, but said nothing.

“All right,” Mixun said. “They did save our lives back on Icewall. We’ll give them something.” He mused. “Twenty percent?”

“Fifty percent. They’ll need it.”

“For what?” said Mixun, raising his voice.

“To equip our next trip to Icewall.”

Mixun jerked his comrade farther away from scavenging islanders and the gnomes. “Are you crazy?” he hissed. “We’re not going back to Icewall! That was a song for the marks, that stuff about selling ice in every port-”

“I’m going to do it,” Raegel said simply.

Mixun stared. “You’re not serious, are you?”

“I am. The figures I gave the island people weren’t lies. We can get a steel piece per pound in any port, mark my words. And how many pounds do you think was in that ice floe? A million? Two million? Twenty? That’s serious coinage, Mix, my friend.”

Twenty million steel pieces? All the scams for the rest of his life wouldn’t net Mixun so much money. Was this scheme of Raegel’s the real thing? On far less than twenty million he could redeem his inheritance and fulfill his destiny in his homeland.

He studied Raegel’s face. The former farm boy from Throt was lost in a waking dream-no doubt surveying some distant vista of ice. If they could sell it, they could turn an island of ice into an island of money. In that moment, Mixun caught the dream too.

“Hey, Slipper!” he called. The little gnome, seated on a broken barrelhead, turned to face him. “How much ice was in that berg, anyway?”

The calculations took only minutes, but the resulting argument lasted the rest of the day.

At the corner of Globe and Market Streets, in the City of Seven Circles, Palanthas the Ancient, two kender skidded around the corner of the Military and Medical Guild of the Gnomes of Mount Nevermind-Local 458, Palanthian Division, the MMGGMN (mmggmn for short). Farther up Globe Street, from whence an angry mob surged, stood the ancient and revered Cartographer’s Guild, and it was no surprise that many in the mob brandished an assortment of compasses (the pointy kind), long metal rules, and T-squares. Even a few surveyor’s sticks bobbed in their midst, like pikemen in a ragtag army.

Neither was it surprising that, from the voluminous pouches of the elder kender, there protruded a shock of newly acquired rolls of parchment bound with green ribbons and bearing the great seal of the Cartographer’s Guild impressed in an official-looking red wax. The two kender were not aware that it was they who were the object of the chase. They were simply trying to get out of the mob’s way, while at the same time clambering for a glimpse of the two thieves who had so earned the mob’s ire.

The two kender ducked behind a stone staircase and watched the mob roll by, cross Market Street, and sweep onward along Poulter’s Lane, chickens rising before them like dust before a cavalry charge. The elder kender stepped into the street to watch the tail of the mob dwindle away, a grin on his face that seemed to continue all the way up to the tips of his pointy ears. His companion, however, remained seated in the shade of the steps, for it was an uncommonly hot day, and he looked miserable. His hair (if one could call it that) was a veritable rat’s nest, with an honest-to-goodness rat living in it. His clothes, leggings, vest, and even his pouches appeared to be held together by force of will alone (or maybe it was the dried mud). Likely, they had not seen a tailor’s shop, even from a distance, since the Second Cataclysm. Were the companion kender to sneeze, in all probability he would have emerged from the resultant cloud of dust naked as the day he was born. Contrary to popular belief, kender are not born fully clothed, their pouches already stuffed with other people’s belongings.

The elder kender was as unsurprising in appearance as his companion was exceptional. He was the living epitome of a kender, from his hoopak to his lime green leggings to his orange-furred vest, all the way up to a topknot that had grown beyond preposterous and was dangling over the edge of absurd. He’d been meticulously growing it every day of his eighty-odd years, and it was now as long as the tail of a beer-wagon horse. In winter, he wore it as both a hat and a scarf at the same time. He could also tie it under his nose and pretend to be a dwarf. If the kender race could be bothered with writing books about themselves, they might have put his picture on the cover.

Now that the fun was over, the elder kender looked around for something new to do. In Palanthas, there was always something new to do. But as his gray eyes fell upon his miserable companion, a spasm of sadness passed over his wrinkled brown face. Blinking back a tear and almost reaching for a handkerchief, his eyes strayed up the side of the imposing marble building looming over them. Suddenly, his face brightened, the wrinkles around his eyes writhed with glee, and he stuffed the hanky away before he’d finished drawing it out.

“Whort, my boy,” he said, “we’re here.”

Hearing the riot outside, Dr. Palaver set aside his delicate alchemical experiment for a moment, exited his office, and crossed the lobby to the front door. It being late in the day, all of the other members of the Military and Medical Guild of the Gnomes of Mount Nevermind, Local 458, Palanthian Division, had already gone home, and the doors were locked.

As he approached the door, he searched his pockets for the keys, found them, then dropped them. He bent to pick them up, heard a loud bang, and the next thing he knew, two kender were sitting beside him, patting his cheeks and waving various bottles of ointments, esters, and tinctures under his long bulbous nose, while going through his pockets as though they were their own. His keys had vanished altogether. He was flat on his back on the floor, with a large knot swelling on his enormous bald head. He slapped away their hands, sat up, swooned, and awoke again just in time to keep them from pouring some concoction of their own mixing down his throat.

“What’s all this?” the gnome managed to bluster.

“What’s wrong with your voice?” the elder kender asked, his jaw falling open.

“My voice? My voice? Does it sound confabulated? Oh, dear. I hope you didn’t pour anything unmaturated down my throat while I was napping. Say, what happened? The last thing l remember is bending over to pick-up the keys and hearing a loud bang…”

“Someone hit you on the head with the door,” the elder kender answered, interrupting him. “We found you here. I thought for a moment that you weren’t a gnome. You looked like a gnome, but you were talking much too slowly. It is very important that we see a gnome, but now I see that you are one after all, and so it is much better.” He helped the gnome to rise.

“By the way, my name is Morgrify Pinchpocket,” the kender said, extending his small brown hand.

The gnome placed a pair of spectacles on the end of his nose and examined the kender’s hand. “Whatap-pearstobethetrouble?” he asked, while removing a small rubber mallet from one of the two-dozen pockets in his long white coat.

“Nothing’s wrong with my hand!” Morg responded, snatching back his hand and stuffing it safely into one of his own pockets (as opposed to someone else’s). “It’s my nephew here, Whortleberry Pinchpocket. Show your manners to the doctor, Whort.”

The younger kender stepped forward and dragged his foot across the floor, his head bowed. “Erngh,” he said, or something very like that.

“Remarkable! I’ve never seen a case like it. What-doyoucallit?” The gnome dropped his hammer and pulled a rather large book from a rather small pocket in his coat, opened it, and began flipping through the pages. “Manners, do you say? Let me see… mumps, mouth-and-foot disease, melancholy measles, mealy mouth malthasia… Nope, no manners. Is it a partic-ulated kender confliction?”