Conundrum

“Home,” Captain Hawser answered. “Giants can’t find us here, so this is home. But only for a little while, now that you’re here.”

Chapter 28

There are few things in this or any world that so cut against the kender grain as work when there is fun to be had. Razmous had spent three interminable weeks fulfilling his duties as chief acquisitions officer, leading expeditions through the ruins in search of iron to repair the Indestructible. As interesting as exploring a ruined city might sound at first, after thirty or so collection “missions,” he was ready to put his head in a UAEP tube and explode. Once he got over the really, really big architecture and saw his two thousandth forest of stone columns, there wasn’t much to it.

To really put the beard on the dwarf, Commodore Brigg had absolutely and irrevocably forbidden him, under any circumstances, unto perpetuity, to search for the giants” lair. It wasn’t that he wanted to see a giant, in particular. He just wanted to do something.

The others were all cheerfully busy at their individual tasks. Doctor Bothy continued to search for a cure to his hiccoughs, which had not abated in three weeks. Conundrum and Commodore Brigg were helping the professor modify one of the ascending kettles so that it could be lowered by means of a wench attached to the stern of the Indestructible, down through the hole at the bottom of the flooded portion of the cavern. They wanted to see if it really was bottomless, or a way to the Abyss, or to the other side of Krynn, or a possible way out. They had renamed the ascending kettle for this purpose, calling it a diving bell. This interested the kender for a while, until Commodore Brigg refused to allow him to be the first to go down in the bell. As the most qualified scientist, the professor was going to hazard the journey himself.

Sir Tanar was busy doing whatever it was that wizards did. This seemed to consist of standing around looking surly and aloof, of else poking around in dark places when he thought he wasn’t being followed, searching for secret passages leading to fabulous treasures, of which there apparently were none. Captain Hawser and Chief Portlost were busy with the mechanical crab, stripping its hull for parts for the Indestructible or effecting repairs to the ship. By the end of the three weeks, the crab was little more than a naked skeleton, though it still contained most of its mechanical components and could be operated as usual.

This left only Sir Grumdish to provide a measure of amusement for the kender, but he spent most of his days holed up inside his armor, sulking because the mechanical crab was so much more spectacular than his own humble mechanical armor. It had quite taken the joy out of his attempt to become a Knight. Razmous had spent the better part of a day begging him to go on a long explore, but to no avail. The next day, Sir Grumdish dismantled his armor and flung the pieces in a corner. He spent the remainder of the third week sitting atop the base of a fallen marble column, staring at a blank cracked wall.

After three weeks, Commodore Brigg finally released Razmous from his duties. They had all the iron they needed to complete their repairs, the Indestructible was once more afloat-with the addition of the boom and wench and the diving bell hanging from its end. With the gnomes no longer shouting, “Razmous, more iron! Razmous, find something a little bigger next time!” every two turns of the glass, the kender was finally able to slip away alone for a little private investigation. He had seen some promising ruins during his iron-mongering expeditions. One thing that Captain Hawser said in their first encounter stuck in his mind, rolling round and round like a pebble in a barrel, endlessly repeating until it had become a little chant, the first verse in a kender traveling song. A passage linking the city with Charynsanth’s lair.

It called to the kender like the smell of honey to a bear.

The perfect time to search for the passage was, of course, while the geysers were venting. All the gnomes would be hiding underground, and he could slip away unnoticed. He might even run into a giant by accident in the fog, and he was pretty certain it wasn’t breaking the rules if you just happened across a giant.

As he crept down a deserted, fog-shrouded street, he paused at a corner to consult a map by the light of a nearby lava pool. Warm sweat dripped from his forehead down his pointed” nose and onto the parchment covered with his own cartographical scrawls. During his search for iron parts to repair the Indestructible, he had made careful observations of his surroundings and committed them to maps. Marked in red on these maps were those places he most wanted to explore, in green those places he sort of wanted to explore, and in blue those places Sir Tanar had already explored (with Razmous secretly following him), but which still contained interesting nooks and crannies that the wizard had probably overlooked.

It was toward one of these places in blue ink that he was heading, since it was nearest the ship. It was a pile of rubble cast up against the dressed stone wall of the cavern. Sir Tanar had poked around in it for a while, probably hoping to find dead bodies or some other nasty thing to use in his spells. Razmous didn’t believe that it contained anything of that sort, though if it did, it certainly would be interesting. Instead, he believed it might cover an entrance or possibly even an exit.

Satisfied that he was on the right track, Razmous continued on his way, arriving a few minutes later at the site. It appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rubble extending more than halfway across the broad avenue, heaped up to a height of forty or fifty feet against the wall.

He avoided the loose piles of stone at the edges and went straight for the larger boulders nearer the wall. By turning sidewise and rearranging his pouches, he was able to slip between a promising pair and found himself, after a tight squeeze and a scramble over some loose gravel, in a long, tube-shaped cavern bearded with long pointed stalactites and prickled with short, stumpy stalagmites. The nearest of these looked to have been worn down to little more than a nub of its former self, and it appeared to have been blackened by fire. The far end of the tunnel, though hazy with smoke, was lit by a flickering blood-red glow.

Smiling, Razmous strode forward, and painfully stubbed his toes against the skull of some gigantic, ugly humanoid. Its heavy brow thrust out over a flattened, crooked nose and large, misshapen mouth filled with a hideous snarl of yellow teeth, some of which had fallen out. The skull was nearly as large as the kender and twice as heavy. Nearby lay a rib cage large enough to hold a bear. Razmous crawled inside, sat down, removed his boot, and massaged his bruised piggies. A reddish gleam near the wall caught his eye, and brushing aside some ancient cobwebs, he removed a large, dry, dusty crimson scale. He examined it for a moment before dropping it into one of his pouches, slipping his foot into his boot, and continuing on his way.

The cavern was much longer than he’d imagined. By the time he reached the farther end, Razmous was dusty, bedraggled, and thoroughly exhausted. His topknot hung like a limp rag over his nose, stray strands of hair clinging to his parched lips and the gummy corners of his eyes.

Yet he didn’t mind, not at all. The trip had been worth every scraped shinbone, crushed toe, and skinned knuckle, for below him, at the base of a long broad slope, lay the red dragon.

Reorx’s Black Boots! What a dragon. Razmous had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting, “How do you do?” He’d seen the dragon for only a few moments three weeks ago when it attacked them: once as it breathed fire on two of his companions-that had been interesting, though very sad-and once as it peered through the portholes of the ship. Of course, in both cases, he’d only caught a glimpse. Now, the dragon lay stretched out on a bed of gold and steel coins, snoozing like a cat before a warm hearth.

Even farther below lay the lake of fire, and in its midst was the island where the dragon’s egg still lay atop its comparatively smaller pile of treasure. The dragon’s lair was high up near the cavern’s roof, where it could keep watch over its egg. Razmous noted the cleverness of this plan, nodding in appreciation of how exposed and vulnerable they had been when approaching the egg.

His eyes flickered back to the dragon and drank in the sight, burning it into his memory so that he could sit before a fire some day and tell others of what he had seen. Razmous was rather young for a kender, only being twenty years or so into his wanderlust-the peculiar urge to see the world firsthand that most kender begin to feel in their early twenties. Being so young, he had little memory of how things were before the coming of the great dragons and the subsequent Dragon Purge. He could count on two fingers the dragons he had seen before this one-Malys, whom he had glimpsed only from a distance, and Pyrothraxus, whom he had seen up close and personal during his visits to Mount Nevermind. But even Pyrothraxus, who was much smaller than Malys, dwarfed this dragon