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 pa.s.sed 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 bl.u.s.ter.

"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, s.n.a.t.c.hing 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?"

"A what?"

"Is it peculiar, to your knowledge?" the gnome attempted to elaborate.

"Most peculiar," the kender answered. "You see, he's broken, and I'd like to get him fixed." He leaned closer and whispered, "I think he's been afflicted."

"Anafflictedkenderohhowmarvelous!" Dr. Palaver exclaimed as he led them through his alchemical laboratory.

Several large pots galloped atop a small stove, which caused the whole contraption to rock and scoot slowly around the room. Morg stood on his toes to see what was cooking and very nearly set his topknot on fire. Meanwhile, the doctor led Whort through a door that opened into an examination chamber.

"I've never had the opportunity to study an afflicted kender before. How did he come by it? I have heard that it is caused by expostulation to some source of vaporous fear, like that induced by dragons or other . . . do you mind if I measure his skull?"

He took down from the wall a device that looked like a giant nutcracker and approached the younger kender. Whort backed away, shaking his head and moaning "Erngh!" most emphatically.

"What is he afraid of?" the gnome asked.

"Everything!" Morg groaned.

"Everything?"

"Everything."

"Mostpeculiarindeed!" the gnome squeaked with a little gleeful spring. "Renderareafraidofnothingbuthe-isafr iadofeverythinghowmarvelous!"

He began opening cupboards, of which there were perhaps three score, and drawers numbering in the hundreds. In the middle of the room stood a squat white marble examination table covered with what looked to be the same paper a butcher uses to wrap pork chops or whatnot. The large drain in the floor also did not bode well.

Dr. Palaver rattled about the room, gathering his instruments onto a large wooden tray and spilling various gleaming metal contraptions in his wake. Morg dutifully followed behind him, picking them up, but most of them somehow ended up in his own pockets rather than atop the doctor's tray. The gnome did not seem to notice, so intent was he on his "unprecedented opportunity maybe even an article in the MMGGMN semi-quarterly annual," and with running about, snapping his fingers and exclaiming, "Yes, I shall need that too!"

Whort crawled onto the examination table and curled up into a ball of dirt. His rat poked its head out of his hair and watched the doctor with growing alarm.

Finally, Dr. Palaver stood beside his patient and fingered through the instruments on the wooden tray. He picked up a small yellow card and held it at arm's length from his face, peered down his nose and through his spectacles at it, reading aloud, "Now then, what seems to be the problem?" He dropped the card, lifted a device that looked like a flat piece of wood, and shoved it into Whort's mouth. "Say ah."

"Erngh."

"He can't speak," Morg said.

"Cannot speak? Tch-tch. What a shame." The doctor sympathized while trying to maneuver the beam of a bullseye lantern into the kender's gaping mouth.

"It's a tragedy!" Morg exclaimed.

"Erngh," Whort agreed, choking on the stick.

The doctor removed the stick from Whort's mouth and snapped the lid on the lantern. "Repeat after me. Big brown bugbear biting blue bottleflies."

"Erngh."

"You have been living with gully dwarves," Dr. Palaver noted.

"Erngh."

"That's remarkable!" Morg said in awe. "I found him in the sewers in the company of about forty gully dwarves. You see, his mother sent me to look for him-"

"Elementary. The smell alone testifies to his modus homunculus," the doctor said.

"Yes, I had noticed that. You see, his mother sent me-"

"The prognosis is obfuscated," Dr. Palaver announced.

"She sent me- It's what?"

"I know what is wrong with him."

"You do?" Morg asked excitedly. "Can you fix him?"

"I am not a surgeon, and even if I were this boy's cure is not to be found at the point of a knife," Dr. Palaver said, as he dumped the tray of instruments on the examination table. He lifted a long butcher's blade from the ma.s.s of metal and held it up to the light. "Not this one, anyway."

"Erngh."

"Whortleberry is suffering from acute panic psoriasis," the doctor p.r.o.nounced.

"It sounds horrible!" Morg cried. "Is it catching? Does it itch? Will he live? What is it?"

"It means that he is afraid."

The elder kender's face hardened. "We already know that! Are you sure you are a doctor?" he asked. "Don't you fellows carry a badge or something?"

"There is the name on the door if you care to look," the gnome answered, somewhat miffed. "In any case you did not allow me to complete my diagonal, concerning the gully dwarves. You see, the laborious odor of these creatures has permutated into his speaking glands, interrupting their normal effluvia of sound, while his fear-whatever its cause-has conscripted the muscles around his talk bone, preventing its ability to swing freely."

"So what is to be done?" Morg asked.

"There is only one cure, and of course I have only just invented it today. That is why I was so late leaving, or you might not have found me on the floor," the gnome said as he helped Whort from the table. The rat retreated back into Whort's hair.

"The cure," Dr. Palaver said as he led Morg and Whort down a low, dark, odiferous tunnel, "is to face the fear that produced the affectation, while at the same time indigesting a special formula-of which I am the inventor and which should evacuate the speak glands. Since I speculum that the source of the fear originates down here in the sewers, where you first found your nephew, the cure for the fear must also lie in the sewers."

"If you only just invented it today, how can you be sure it will work?" Morg asked.

"There is an old gnomish axiom which states that something will work until it doesn't," Dr. Palaver explained. "And since we don't know that it doesn't work we must a.s.sume that it does. It really is elementary if you think about."

"I see," Morg sighed, though he really didn't see.

When they had reached a certain section of the tunnel that seemed significant to the gnome, but which was no different than any other they had pa.s.sed along the way-except perhaps that there was a particularly vile smell wafting from a nearby pa.s.sageway-the gnome paused and removed a strange-looking device from one of his coat pockets.

"This inflatable sleeve monitors the thickness of the vines in the arm," the gnome said, as he wrapped a thing around the kender's arm that looked like the air bladder of a large fish. A long tube ending in an onion-shaped bulb of similar material depended from one end of the device, while from the other hung three tiny bra.s.s bells of varying sizes and tones. "It is believed that the thickness of the vines in the arm is directly provisional to the state of health. Any sudden changes could indicate a converse reaction to the potion, but we will be alerted to such changes by the ringing of the smallest bell. This middle bell indicates that there is a problem with the first bell, and this largest bell indicates that there is a problem not a.s.sociated with either bell."

Next, the doctor removed a strange set of spectacles from the upper-middle breast pocket of his white coat. They were not ordinary reading spectacles like the ones perched on the tip of his own very large, bulbous nose. Instead, they seemed made of some kind of thick, dark, opaque material through which no light could possibly pa.s.s, and which wrapped completely around the face. "How marvelously hideous!" Morg exclaimed, as the doctor slipped them onto his nephew's nose and wrapped the arms behind his pointy ears. Once on his face, the lenses magnified to grotesque proportions the size of his eyes behind them. He blinked, and it was like someone quickly opening and closing the shutters of a pair of dark windows.

"These spectacles measure the pupae reactions of the eyes for any changes which could indicate possible side effects such as a sudden onset of death-like symptoms. The lenses also prevent any outside influx of proprietary confluences which might construe the results obtained from the measurement of the potion's benefits. Do you understand?"

"Not really."

"Erngh."

"Excellent! Shall we begin?" The gnome snapped open the cover of his bullseye lantern. Pointing a long narrow beam of light ahead of him, he led the two kender into a smaller pa.s.sage of the sewer. He splashed heedlessly through the muck, while Whort trudged behind and Morg brought up the rear, leaping nimbly or pole-vaulting with his hoopak from dry spot to dry spot in a vain attempt to keep his bright green leggings clean.

Few but the most esoteric of scholars and thieves knew this, but the sewers of Palanthas weren't really sewers at all. They were an ancient dwarven city, carved into the bedrock centuries before the first humans sailed into the Bay of Branchala, even before the wizards raised the Tower of High Sorcery with their magic. But the city was abandoned by the dwarves long before the humans took over the land above it. Those who first discovered it found it empty and desolate. Some say it was once part of the great dwarven empire of Kal-Thax, which vanished without a trace before Thorbardin was even a dream in the mind of Reorx.

As they rounded a bend in the sewer, the trio entered a much larger pa.s.sage than any they had encountered so far. It was also by far the most pungent. Before them lay a small lake of sewage, in which floated as varied a collection of garbage as any city could boast-everything from a toy boat with a broken mast to a dead and very bloated pig to a whole wagon bobbing belly up with its wheels in the air. Large brown globs of thick and apparently solid foam b.u.mped about among the more common rotting rinds of vegetables, slicks of oil, and shingles of congealed fat.

"We call this place the Gully Dwarf Stew Pot," the gnome shouted over the smell, as he tied a bit of white cloth across the front of his face. "This section of the tunnel invertabrately clogs up during the rainless summer months, and gully dwarves find this place irrefutable. The Civil Engineering Guild Local 1101 is currently discussing a hundred and forty-three possible solutions, but in the meantime I can think of no better place to begin to effect a revolution of the patient's melody."

"I've never smelled anything quite so extraordinary," Morg said, while pinching his nose. A burning and curiously itchy curiosity to explore every inch of this place and see what might be found floating in the water competed with a very real concern for the future state of his clothing.

The gnome hitched up his coat and jumped in, promptly sinking up to his white beard. Being a kender and thus somewhat taller than his gnomish companion, the sewage only came up to Whort's pouches, but his uncle, being much weighted by his more recent acquirements, slipped upon landing and vanished below the surface. He came up spluttering and thrashing, while his maps spread around him like a jam of small logs. They quickly began to sink, many vanishing into the dark mucky water before he could recover his wits and grab them.

"Come along, this way. Follow me!" the gnome ordered as he started off, flailing the water to aid his progress. Morg stuffed his remaining maps into a shoulder pouch, making sure to tie it securely shut before continuing.

Though this section of the sewer was illuminated at irregular intervals by iron grates set in the roof, there was very little light to see by, and the water was so thick with muck that no light could pierce its depths. At each step, there was a danger of dropping into some deep hole. The three explorers felt their way along the slimy bottom as they slogged through the water, wary of sudden drops, or worse.

As the sewer merged with the Market Street tunnel, the grates in the roof gradually grew more frequent, providing more light and helping to speed their progress. Because this section of the sewer opened directly into Market Street, one of the busiest streets in all Palanthas, it was no wonder that citizens of Palan-thas desired some means of preventing it from clogging, or to clear the clog once it was, well, clogged. To this end, the local gnomes had been diligently working for a number of years, with varying degrees of success. One of their most promising devices, the very large SNAKE (Self Navigating Auto-Keyhole Eviscerator-the original design was much smaller and was intended to clean keyholes clogged with rust) proved unreliable and was last reported still burrowing away somewhere near the town of Lemish.

Their most recent design was originally thought too simple to work, but to date it had pa.s.sed every test. It consisted of a large wooden ball only slightly smaller in diameter than the pa.s.sage it was meant to unstop. The ball was deployed upstream from the clog, then carried to the clog by the flow of water, where it punched through by the force of its own weight combined with the ma.s.s of water that had built up behind it. Downstream, it would be caught and wrestled back up an access pa.s.sage to the street, for redeployment or storage, as needed. For explorers of the Palanthian sewer system, often the only warning of this bowling disaster came when the sewer suddenly drained away, rather like the surf before an oncoming tidal wave. So it was with no small alarm that Dr. Palaver realized he was crawling along the bottom of the sewer rather than swimming through its sludge. He looked back and found his companions standing only knee deep in the water, with the level swiftly receding.

Whort, who had spent some time, years perhaps, living in the sewers of Palanthas, knew immediately that danger loomed. The bells on his sleeve commenced to tinkle quite vigorously in his agitation. He grabbed his uncle's arm and pulled, but Morg was much too intent on what was, by the sound of it, bowling from behind them.

The thing filled all the pa.s.sage, blotting out the light streaming from above and casting the pa.s.sage into ever deepening darkness. It was constructed of circular layers of wood bolted together and coated by a hard slick varnish to keep out the water and maintain buoyancy. It ground along the pa.s.sageway, pushed from behind by what appeared to be a wall of water reaching all the way to the roof.

"We'll be crushed!" Morg remarked gleefully. Dr. Palaver had already fled, abandoning his patient, before Whort got his uncle turned around and headed in the right direction. But there was nowhere to run. They quickly caught up to the puffing old physician as he stood before the tunnel blockage-a ma.s.sive dam of sticks, treelimbs, bones, bits of furniture and cloth, a wheel, the bodies of more rats than they cared to count, even a bathtub, all cemented together by the thick black sewer sludge.

"Trapped like gully dwarves!" the doctor cried, pulling at his beard.

But Whort had no desire to be flattened, crunch or no crunch. Turning his uncle once more, he shoved the elder kender into a hole in the wall barely wide enough to admit his pouches and hoopak. Complaining volubly of missing all the fun, Morg climbed inside. Dr. Palaver followed, with Whort dragging his feet to safety a bare heartbeat before the sewer ball cast the tiny upward-sloping pipe into pitchy darkness.

Of course, a moment later, raw sewage roared in behind them, blasting the two kender and their gnomish companion up the length of the pipe, disgorging them into a small, round chamber dimly lit by a grate in the low roof above.

"Ah. We have reached a safe room. Good show," the gnome said as he wrung out the sleeves of his no-longer white coat. "We should be quite safe here. You see, the safe rooms lie above the highest level of the sewer. Even at flood time, we will have to wait a bit for the level to subsist, but then I think we may then continue our search for gully dwarves."

"Won't those do?" Morg asked while pinching his nostrils. With his free hand, he pointed into a dark corner, where a half dozen pairs of beady black eyes gleamed back at them.

"They will do admiralty," the gnome answered. He rushed to Whort's side. "I will minotaur your reactions as you approach the gully dwarves. Are you afraid?"

Whort shook his head that he wasn't, almost dislodging the strange spectacles still clinging to his pointy ears.

"Approach them now," the doctor ordered. "When I tell you, you must drink the potion. Do you have it?"

Whort shook his head that he didn't. Dr. Palaver frantically searched his own pockets, until Morg produced it from one of his own. "You left it on the table back at the office," he explained.

Whort took the potion, then stepped toward the gully dwarves, moving into a thin beam of light descending through a tiny grate in the roof. Perhaps it was his eyes, hugely magnified through the gla.s.ses, which frightened them, for the gully dwarves began to scream and bite each other. Whort backed away, hiding his features in the shadows opposite the room. "Erngh," he groaned miserably.

The gully dwarves screamed again at the sound, and continued to chew one anothers' ears, fingers, noses, and whatever was handy. Soon, the cries turned from fright to anger, and a fight broke out which threatened to engulf them all. The two kender and the gnome backed up against the wall, wary of flashing yellow teeth or grubby nails.

"Inflections! Inflections!" the gnome cried. "Do not let them bite you or you'll get an inflection!"

Finally, the disagreement subsided, with only a few missing ears and one gnawed pinky finger. Like a shark-haunted bank of herring, in the blink of an eye the gully dwarves had turned, swirled, then collected back in their shadowy corner, all facing in the same direction again.

"I suppose I may have misdirected you," Dr. Palaver said as he examined Whort's sleeve and protective goggles. "I had hypostacized that agharaphobia might be the cause of your fears, but obviously you aren't afraid of gully dwarves as I first surmounted. Say ah." He whipped out another wooden plank (this one much begrimed and hardly very sanitary) and shoved it into the kender's mouth.

"Erngh," Whort gagged.

"As I suspected! The talk bone is still constricted. Well then, we shall just have to find the true source of your fear. As my tormentor used to say, when all other probabilities have been exploded, whatever remains, no matter how smelly, must be the truth." Dr Palaver tossed aside his dipstick. "One of you wouldn't have anything of interest to a gully dwarf?"

"Would a rat do?" Morg asked, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he withdrew the dead rat he had just discovered in one his pouches.

In answer, the gully dwarves began to slaver and creep forward, eyeing the limp, wet morsel dangling from the kender's fingertips. Dr. Palaver took the rat from Morg and shook it temptingly before the gully dwarves, drawing them even farther from their shadowy nook.

Taking great care to speak slowly so that they could understand him (gnomes were notoriously rapid speakers), the doctor said in sweet tones, "Whoever shows me the scariest place in the whole sewer gets this rat. Do any of you know where the scariest place in the whole sewer is?"