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

“Flint, there was ! You saw them. And the field mice, and the owl. And what about the rabbit, Flint? It slept against your foot all the time.”

This time Flint made no firm denial. “Kender stories,” he snorted. He glanced sidelong at Tanis and veered sharply away from the subject of magic pipes. “Are you certain Sturm is ready to travel?”

“So he says, and I think he is.”

“I’d like to check that bandage once more.”

Tas watched him leave, then reached over to finger a broken pack strap that had been giving the old dwarf trouble. “Look, Tanis.”

“Frayed, but it should hold with repair.”

“No. Look. It’s not frayed. The goat chewed it.”

“Yes, well ...” Tanis smiled and quietly relieved Tas of Flint’s small whittling knife. “Fell out of the pack, did it?”

Tas’s eyes widened innocently. “Oh! I guess it did. Good thing I found it. Flint wouldn’t have been happy to leave it behind. But what about the pack strap?”

“It looks frayed to me.” He patted Tas’s shoulder. “Come on, now. It’s time to go.”

“I don’t know why no one believes me, Tanis.”

Tanis wished then, for the sake of the wistful hope in the kender’s voice, that he could believe in the magic pipe. But it sounded too much like all of Tas’s fantastic stories. Some, doubtless, were true. But Tan-is had never been able to separate those from the soaring flights of imagination that Tas passed off as adventures.

“You know,” he said kindly, “enchanted or not, your piping saved our lives. If we hadn’t heard it, Sturm and I would have died out there.”

“I’m glad it did, Tanis, I really am. But, still, I wish someone would believe I found the magic. I don’t know why Flint won’t. He saw the deer and the goat and the mice and the owl. And the rabbit was sleeping against his foot.”

That rabbit, Tanis realized then, was not among the things that Flint denied. In matters of magic, that might be, where Flint was concerned, considered avowal.

When he looked up again Tas had gone. Rising to join the others, he caught sight of something small and abandoned on the floor. “Tas, you forgot your pipe.” He picked it up and then saw words carved into the wood that he had not seen before.

Find the music, find the magic.

“Did you carve this?”

Tas did not turn. “Yes,” he said, reluctantly. “I have to leave it.”

“But, Tas, why?”

Tas squared his shoulders as though firming some resolve. But still he did not turn. “Because the shepherd said that it could only be used once. That’s why I can’t get the pipe to play that song again—or any song. I’ve used the magic.” He took a deep breath and went on. “And he said that once I found the magic I had to pass the pipe on.” He paused and then he did turn, a scamp’s humor in his long brown eyes. “It’s going to be a long winter. I’m going to leave it here for someone else to find.”

Suddenly, as sharply as though he was yet there, the half-elf saw himself crouched in the snow, too aching and exhausted to move. He felt again the bitter whip of the wind, the life-draining cold. He heard, very faintly, the coaxing tune that had called him back from freezing. Maybe, he thought, seeing the earnest belief in the kender’s brown eyes. Maybe ...

But no. If there were any magic in the shabby little pipe at all, it lay in the fact that Tas, that inveterate and inevitable collector, could be induced to believe that he must leave behind a pipe he swore was enchanted.

Tanis grinned again. That, he supposed, was magic enough for one pipe.

Nugold Lodston shook a gnarled fist at his youthful tormentors.

“Get away! Pester somebody else! Leave me alone!”

The old hermit shielded his face with his forearm from another flurry of pebbles amid the laughter of the dirty street urchins and their audience of amused onlookers. He despised these trips into Digfel and longed for the quiet solitude of his cave on the banks of the Meltstone River.

“We don’t want your kind in Digfel, you old miser. Go home to Hylar where you belong, and take your worthless gold with you!”

The aged dwarf squinted in the general direction of the adult voice. His eyesight was terrible, even for his four hundred years. A blurry outline of a heavy human figure loomed in front of him, barring his way into Milo Martin’s shop. It was obvious that he had to either push past the abusive speaker or retreat through his delinquent henchmen without buying winter provisions.

“Remove your carcass from my path, and take your ill-bred issue with you!” Lodston shouted. Several of the spectators laughed at the old hermit’s taunt. The blurry-faced speaker leaned closer, revealing his florid cheeks and filthy, tobacco-stained mouth to the dwarf’s faded eyes.

“You heard what I said, scum! Get out of Digfel before I feed your scrawny bones to my dogs!” blustered the fat townsman. Lodston smelled the odors of stale wine and unwashed human skin even before he could see the man’s quivering red jowls. He grinned and gestured toward the beggar children.

“If those are your mongrels, you ought to be more careful when you mate. You’ll ruin your bloodline!” Lodston sneered and shook his quarterstaff in the drunk’s face, which was darkening with rage as the catcalls grew louder.

“You gonna let him talk to you like that, Joss?” someone goaded the drunk.

“Kick that uppity dwarf in the teeth, if he’s got any!” yelled one of the urchins.

The drunken bully sputtered a curse and raised a beefy hand. In the same instant, Lodston muttered a single word with his bearded mouth pressed against the smooth shaft of his heavy staff. The stick of rare bronzewood glowed suddenly with an inner light and began to vibrate in the hermit’s hand. The old dwarf seemed almost as surprised as everyone else by the force within the enchanted weapon and nearly dropped it. He clutched its shaft more tightly, feeling its inner power throbbing as it lifted itself in the air above the bully’s head.

Suddenly the staff descended repeatedly, faster than the eye could see, upon the head of Nugold Lodston’s assailant. It appeared to the astonished onlookers as if it were a drumstick in the hands of a practiced drummer. Each blow landed with vicious force and accuracy, producing lacerations and bruises on the startled bully’s scalp and face.

“Run, Joss! It’s a magical staff! He’ll kill you!” The bully’s eyes were blinded with his own blood from the wounds on his forehead. He backed away from Lodston’s flashing staff, his hands raised in front of his face to ward off the unerring blows of the enchanted weapon. To the hermit’s failing eyes, the scene was a muddled image of fleeing shapes as the street emptied. Digfel was a superstitious town, especially in the rough section where Milo Martin kept his store.

“Get in here, Nugold, before they come back!” Martin’s rotund figure was standing in the doorway of his shop. He was gesturing frantically for the hermit to come inside. The staff had already lost the aura summoned by the ancient command word, but the merchant’s bulging eyes were staring greedily at it.

The hermit grunted a minor dwarvish epithet to himself and pushed past the excited shopkeeper into the store. Smells of candlewax, oil, and soap mingled with those of wood smoke, spices, and leather—the comfortable and familiar odors of Martin’s General Store. Lodston came to Digfel no more than four or five times a year, and this was one of the few places he liked to shop for provisions. Digfel was a rowdy human mining town on the outskirts of the dwarven mountains, steeped in fears and prejudices dating to the Cataclysm. Milo Martin’s shop had a reputation as a brief haven amid the turmoil of the times, perhaps because Martin himself was such a tolerant man. The jolly but enterprising little merchant sold his goods to anyone with iron coins in his pockets, whether dwarf, human, or elf. Only kender, those notorious shoplifters, were unwelcome in his store.