Ник О'Донохью: Kender, Gully Dwarves, and Gnomes

Puzzled, Flint turned back to the door and gasped. Looming like some dream beast was a rough-coated mountain goat. To the left of the goat, its antlers heavy with snow, a dark-eyed deer waited.

Dipping its antlers—courteous beast, Flint thought and so thinking abandoned his sense and logic—the deer stepped into the shelter. The goat, as though hanging back to await the passage of mountain royalty, entered last.

Nothing Flint had ever seen was brighter than the delight shining in Tas’s eyes. His pipe still in hand, the kender leaped to his feet, ducked around the deer, patted the goat, and scurried to the door.

“Flint! Look! Do you see? I brought them here!”

Flint shook his head. I can’t be seeing this! he thought, stubbornly. And I’m not!

“It’s the pipe! It’s the pipe, Flint! Listen!”

Again that enticing, gentle song. Behind him Flint heard the thick flap of wings. He ducked only in time to miss being struck by a wide-eyed owl. Two white-bellied mice darted past his feet, saw the owl, and dove screaming behind Tas’s pack.

“Tas! Stop!”

“No, Flint! It’s the magic! They heard it! I wanted them to hear, and they did.”

Magic? Flint turned this way and that, and everywhere he looked he saw what he knew he shouldn’t be seeing. Sputtering protest, stammering questions, he received no answers from Tas.

The kender was on the floor again, bent over his pipe, his eyes squeezed shut in fierce concentration. He’d brought the rabbit and the deer. The mountain goat had heard and found him. And two mice and an owl. Soon, surely, his song would bring Tanis and Sturm.

Numbly, too stunned to know where to look first, Flint clapped his hands to his ears. After a moment he closed his eyes because there was a deer pawing at the frozen dirt floor, an owl preening its wings in the rafters, and a goat nibbling delicately at the straps of the dwarf’s pack. He felt something soft and warm touch him and looked down to see the rabbit asleep against his foot.

He’d never heard that one of the first signs of freezing was a wild slipping away of the wits. But he imagined that it probably was because he still could not believe that what he saw was real.

Get up, the words whispered. Get up! Come back, they urged. Come back! Lies, they sighed. The cold is telling lies! Like dreams of a blazing hearth seen through frosted windows, the words wandered through Tanis’s mind. Gently they coaxed and encouraged. Beneath the simple words danced the light, bright notes of a shepherd’s pipe. Behind the tune, beyond the words, flickered images of a place where the cold had no power to touch him.

The wind, he thought, pulling away from Sturm. Or just my sanity slipping away ...

But there was no wind. Its howl was silenced. And when he lifted his face to the night sky he no longer felt the snow’s deadly kiss. Beside him Sturm moved, slowly, but with the deliberate care of a man marshalling strength.

“Tanis, do you hear?”

“The wind—it’s died down.”

“Aye,” Sturm agreed, as though it had only just come to his attention. “That, too.”

Tanis looked at him in surprise. “You hear music?”

“Yes. It sounds like a shepherd’s pipe ...” His words wandered away, lost in surprise and sudden realization. “Tas’s pipe, Tanis! We must be near the shelter!”

Tas’s pipe! But that poor, crippled little instrument, the “dreaded pipe” Flint called it, had never given Tas music this sweet. And yet, what other could it be? Tanis climbed wearily to his feet and helped Sturm to rise.

“We’ll follow it,” he said. “No, leave your pack. If the shelter is that close, I can come back for the wood. And I’ve still got mine.”

Home, the music sang, come home ...

Snow ghosts! The spirits of the storm-killed. Or so they would have been called in the faraway mountains of his homeland. Flint watched the eerie blue race of breaking clouds across the white mantle of the snow. He shivered, more from the memory of an old legend than from the cold. Behind him Tas’s pipe faltered, then fell silent.

In an odd little exodus, as soon as the snow had stopped falling, moments after the wind finally died, Tas’s strangely assorted menagerie of storm refugees had filed past him into the night. Still, even after the last creature had left, Tas had continued to play, hoping that Tanis and Sturm would hear the pipe’s music, feel the call of its magic.

Magic! Flint thought now. The word felt bitter and hard in his mind. He told himself that he never had believed. Some wild coincidence, some quirk had led the animals to the shelter. It hadn’t been, after all, any of the pipe’s doing. Though he could still feel, in memory, the frightened race of the rabbit’s heart against his palms, and later the confiding warmth of it where it lay against his foot. Nonsense! The poor little beast was too exhausted and frozen to care where it finally collapsed. He refused to remember the deer and the goat, the mice or the owl. He sighed and kicked at the blackened embers of the fire. We can go out and look now, he thought. He would not allow himself to think further. He did not want to consider what they must find.

“They’re home.” Tas’s voice was oddly hollow.

Flint turned slowly, the skin on the back of his neck prickling. “What did you say?”

The kender’s face was white, etched with weariness. But his eyes were bright with some pleasure or satisfaction that Flint did not understand. “They’re home, Flint. They’re back.” He put his pipe aside. Wobbling to his feet, he went to stand beside the dwarf. He was tired, but it was the best tired he’d ever felt.

Flint peered out into the night. Two shadows intersected those pouring across the gleaming snow. They were darker and more solid than that weird blue flow. Snow ghosts?

Shivering, the old dwarf squinted harder. Not yet! he thought triumphantly. Not yet, they’re not! But one of them was staggering, leaning on the other.

Flint grasped Tas’s shoulders and hurried him back inside the shelter. “Stay here, Tas. stay here . They’re back!”

Tas smiled and nodded. “Of course they’re back. I told you they were. They heard the pipe, they felt the magic—Flint! Where are you going?”

Yawning mightily, forgetting Flint’s warning to stay inside the shelter, Tas retrieved his pipe and jogged out into the snow.

As he had for the past two mornings, Tanis leaned against the door jamb, smiling at the winter sun as though hailing a well-met friend. Beside him Sturm gingerly lifted his pack.

“You’re certain you are well enough to travel?”

The youth nodded once. “Yes.” He was pale yet, but the dressing covering his wound had come away clean with its last two changings.

“You did well, Sturm.”

Sturm’s solemn eyes lighted, then darkened. “No. I almost cost you your life, Tanis. I couldn’t go on, and you stayed.”

“I did. It was my choice. And,” he said quickly, forestalling further protest, “it was a choice, at the time, of freezing with you or a few yards farther on. Where you did well was in another place altogether.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You are a good companion, lad, and one I would not hesitate to travel with again.”

Plainly Sturm still did not understand. But he took the compliment with a notable absence of youthful awkwardness.

In the silence fallen between them Tanis heard the beginnings of an argument between Tas and Flint that had become all too familiar these last two days.

“There was no mountain goat,” Flint growled.

But Tas was insistent. “Yes, there was . And not only that, there was a deer—”

“There was no deer.”

Grinning, Tanis went to join them.