But he quickly realized that there was no sensation of heat upon his skin, nothing to suggest that sunlight was actually spilling into this forsaken pit. Almost immediately he recalled the harsh sound that had accompanied that flash: it was merely the scraping of a match upon tinder! Opening his eyes again, keeping one hand raised to shade the spot of fire from his direct gaze, he began to discern more about his surroundings.
The match-holder’s feet were plainly visible; he was clad in moccasins that-like the voice-were strangely familiar. When those feet advanced closer, not in a stride, nor a charge, but with an almost childish skip, the warrior understood.
“Moptop?” he asked in amazement. It was the first time in his life that he was able to derive even a modicum of pleasure from the presence of a kender. “Is that you?”
“Sure is. This is the most amazing place! You should see it! Well, I guess you will see it, now that you’re here-unless you rush away as fast as you arrived. But tell me, confidentially of course, how did you do that? Get here so fast, I mean?”
“Wait. Let me collect my thoughts.” Jaymes turned his back to the light and inspected his surroundings. He found himself in a cave, an area that was very constricted. A cracked and broken wall loomed no more than four or five paces away, and-though the overhead ceiling was lost in shadow for the most part-he could see the tips of fanglike stalactites jutting down from above in all directions.
The floor was even rougher than he had imagined. A glance around showed that he would have been in for a nasty fall if he took more than a single step in any direction. It seemed the teleport spell had brought him to the top of some kind of square-edged boulder in the middle of a small cavern. The kender was standing on another rock nearby, and as Jaymes’s eyes adjusted, he perceived the opposite wall was not very far beyond his diminutive companion.
“Where did you say we are?” asked the warrior. “Under the Garnet range?”
“Yep. I just happen to be exploring through here. You know, working on my maps. I was thinking there might be a way to Solanthus through here. I wanted to go there and see that place-I’ve never been inside of a siege before! But the goblins wouldn’t let me walk through their camp when I tried to go the regular way. So I came down here. That’s what I was doing when I heard you come along. But you never told me how you-wait a moment! She sent you, didn’t she? The White Lady has magicked you here! Wow, that’s great! She must have figured I’d be needing a partner! Can’t have too many partners when you’re exploring. Real mind reader, the White Lady.”
“Hmm, it’s damned disorienting,” Jaymes retorted. “And confusing. I don’t think she was trying to send me here-we both thought I would arrive in Solanthus!”
“Oh, but you can’t go there by magic. Everyone knows that. There’s a spell that prevents such a thing. I’m surprised she didn’t know that. I should probably write her a note or something and advise her accordingly. You don’t happen to have a piece of paper on you?”
“No! And she does know about the magic barrier. She thought she had found a way to defeat it.”
The kender laughed merrily, the sound grating on the man’s nerves like a squeaking axle. “Well, she was wrong!” Moptop’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s annoying how, sometimes, she acts like she knows everything!”
“Yeah, annoying,” growled Jaymes. He checked over his gear, trying to think, to plan. His great sword, Giantsmiter, was secure upon his back, and his pair of small crossbows remained in their holsters at his waist. Fortunately the sensitive weapons were not loaded-he might easily have shot himself while stumbling around in the darkness here. He was wearing his ring, the little circlet of metal Coryn had imbued with one additional teleport spell. He briefly considered using that to escape this place but shook the idea away. No, Coryn must have some reason for sending him here with the kender. And it would be bitterly disappointing to simply return, without having accomplished anything.
“Ow, hey-that burns!” snapped the kender, dropping the consumed match and most likely popping his singed fingertips into his mouth as darkness surrounded them again.
“Do you have another one of those? Or maybe a torch?” asked Jaymes. He thought of Giantsmiter’s blade, the steely edge that could hiss with its own bright, bluish flame, but he was reluctant to use the legendary weapon for anything so mundane when he would soon need all its powers. He was also loathe to advertise the existence of the weapon, with all its ancient and potent magic, in a place he knew so little about. And it wouldn’t do, he reminded himself, to tell the kender anything he preferred to keep secret.
Fortunately, Moptop did indeed have a supply of dry, lightweight torches, and he quickly ignited one of them and handed it to the man. “I don’t really need the fire to see down here,” he explained. “We kender can see pretty well in the dark. But sometimes a torch is good for details. I like to put in a lot of details when I’m making my maps.”
“Now tell me again: What are you doing here?” Jaymes asked. “Looking for a way into Solanthus?”
“Well, I’m making a map, seeking the best path of course. Did I tell you I’m a professional guide and pathfinder extraordinaire? It’s kind of what I do.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. But isn’t it a little different, taking me to the Lady Coryn’s house in Palanthas, and poking around through some lightless cave under the ground?”
Moptop shrugged. Clearly, no difference was apparent to him. “A path is a path. Some places have better maps, is all.”
“So you know a path out of here?”
“Well, no. I never said that, did I?”
“How did you get here in the first place?”
“Well, I did come down the path that leads into here, of course.”
Jaymes drew a breath. The torch quivered slightly as his fingers clenched around the wooden length. “All right. Think about it this way. Couldn’t we walk out of here on the same path that you walked in on? And wouldn’t that make it a path out of here?”
“Well, for you maybe. But that’s not the way I’m heading. Plus that would simply take me back the way I came, when what I really want to do is find a path to Solanthus. Didn’t you say that the White Lady was trying to magic you into the city? This must be her way of telling you that you might have to go about it the old-fashioned way.”
“And this cavern, you think, will take us to Solanthus?” Jaymes asked warily.
“Well, I sure hope it does, otherwise this whole thing has just been a big waste of time. Not entirely, of course. Lots to see down here.” Moptop pulled out a piece of parchment from one of his innumerable pouches. From another he found a short stick of charcoal with one end sharpened to a point. He gestured to the torch. “Here, I’ll show you. Hold that up a bit, will you?”
Jaymes obliged as the kender slid down off of his boulder to stand on flat space between the two rocks. The man dropped down beside him, holding the light up, and studying the kender’s map as Moptop added a few notes with the smudgy black stick.
Unfortunately, to the human the sketch was simply a confusing mess of scrawled lines and shapes, often intersecting or curving around each other. In some places, crude notations were marked: “No!” “Rong turn” “Watch owt-sinkhole!” and “Oops” were among the few he could decipher. Now the pathfinder was laboriously adding “Find Guy,” next to a big black X. Abruptly, he looked up to see Jaymes observing him.
“I know you’re not just a ‘guy,’ ” Moptop exclaimed hastily. “But I couldn’t fit Lord Marshal Jaymes and all that into this little space.”
“ ‘Guy’ is fine,” the warrior said curtly. “But what about Solanthus?”
“Oh, that’s where the really interesting part comes in…”
An uncountable number of hours later, Jaymes was starting to understand exactly what “the interesting part” entailed. It meant numerous smashes of his head against low-hanging rocks, long stretches of spelunking where he had to crouch down on his hands and knees and crawl along over dust and grime and irregularities in the floor that scraped against his shins or, on more than one occasion, sent him sprawling onto his face.
The farther they continued along, the more he was convinced that Moptop Bristlebrow was simply poking around down here, that he didn’t have any real idea of where they were going, or, more important, how they would ever get there-that is, to Solanthus-through this nightmare world of darkness and stone. By the same token, he despaired of the kender’s ability to retrace his steps, so he was forced to conclude that his best hope was to simply press on and take his chances with the professional guide and pathfinder extraordinaire.
Even so, more than one time, Jaymes caught himself fingering his ring. He considered activating its one
