Kender, Gully Dwarves, Gnomes (4 page)

The storm, Flint told himself, it's only seeking shelter. . . . Easier to believe that
than to believe that his wits had frozen solid around some mad dream. Moving slowly, he
reached his hand out to the rabbit. He had not Tanis's way with animals. That lad could
call a bird to hand, silence a chattering squirrel in the tree with a whisper. Or so it
had often seemed to Flint. But the rabbit accepted the old dwarf's touch and quivered only
a little.

He gathered up the little creature in both hands, felt the quick race of its heart, and
moved his thumb carefully over its broad feet. The snow fell away. Under the warmth of his
hands the ice melted from the rabbit's back.

“There,” he whispered, amazed. He turned the rabbit

back toward the door. “Off with you.” But the rabbit did not, as Flint had expected, dart
away

in fear. It paused in the doorway, seemed for a moment to consider the storm, and turned,
bounding back past Flint and into the shelter. Flint saw it scamper into the shadows
behind him and vanish into the darkness. Tas, still bent over his pipe, looked up only
briefly to laugh.

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 royal ty, 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. "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.

The Wizard's Spectacles Morris Simon

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.