of voices and the snap of burning twigs.
A hollow between two rows of oaks was filled with seated kender. In the center of the smooth, shallow trench, a fire blazed. Seated around it were the Longwalker, Balif, and Lofotan.
Treskan opened his mouth to hail them, but Mathi stopped him. Something was happening, something unusual. The kender were all sitting still, facing the Longwalker and his guests. And they were
“And so Silvanos, called the Golden-Eyed, became Speaker of the Stars and Father of all his Country,” Balif was saying. “Our elder race has grown wise and strong during his reign and will grow wiser and stronger still.”
“Do all the elder folk bend a knee to the Golden-Eyed?” asked the Longwalker.
From where she stood, Mathi could swear Balif’s eyes twinkled. “All with wisdom do. No chief is loved by all.”
“True enough,” said the kender. He glanced over both shoulders at the crowd behind him. “This lot don’t love me. They don’t even like me very much.”
“Sure we do!” piped a voice from the darkness. “As long as you give us drink!”
There was much laughter. Mathi saw Balif had passed around the supply of the nectar that Artyrith had acquired in Free Winds. Kender drank from everything from cups made of rolled tree bark to battered gold goblets liberated, no doubt, from people they met on their travels.
“But what about you, Serius Bagfull? How did you become Longwalker of your people?” Balif asked. He held out a simple, clay cup for Lofotan to fill from a nearly empty skin of nectar.
“I was named such by the Eye.”
“Eye?”
The kender nodded. Fire highlighted his long nose and prominent cheekbones. “As I entered this world, the Eye spoke to me and said I would be the Longwalker of my people.”
“I don’t understand,” said Balif.
“Tell the story!” someone called. Others echoed the cry, but some of the kender objected just as loudly. Serius Bagfull, Longwalker of the wanderfolk, looked embarrassed.
“It is not a tale we tell to those not like us,” he admitted. “But the honorable general has agreed to aid us, so can we not repay him by sharing the story?”
Another mixed chorus of yeas and nays filled the clearing. The Longwalker held up his hands for quiet and received it.
“Sometimes I must act like a chief,” he said apologetically. “If you all do not mind!”
Only crickets sang in the woods. Treskan went down on one knee, opening the case of his writing board with one hand. Hand poised, he prepared to record everything the kender said.
“Time was and time is, as old ones say. Time was there were no wanderfolk in this land but in a place far gone, as far away as the opposite side of a circle. There were lots of us there, lots and lots-too many in fact, and no one had room enough to wander without bumping into another coming from another place. It was a bad time, and the people made trouble for each other out of spite and boredom. They stole-”
“Found!”
“Borrowed!”
The Longwalker cleared his throat. “They hurt each other, even killed one another. The People cried out to our makers for help, but the gods were not listening to our pleas. To get their attention, an especially clever girl named Fina decided to make a lodestone so large, it would pull the gods down from the sky. Then they would have to listen to our pleas.”
Treskan squinted in the poor light, scribbling it all down. He muttered to Mathi that kender as a race were obsessed with natural magnets. Some of them went on quests for decades, collecting every bit of lodestone they could find, filch, or finagle. Outsiders assumed kender had some daffy purpose for collecting magnets. For the first time, the origin of their obsession was revealed.
“Fina convinced her kinfolk to scour the countryside for lodestone. She collected enough to fill forty barrels. She and her cousin Rufus hauled them to the top of Mount Aereera, which was the highest peak in the land. They built a great pile of lodestone, and sure enough, after a day or so, clouds began to gather over the mountain. Lightning came down and struck the mountain all around them, turning the rocks to lodestone as well. The pull became so strong, nothing could resist it.”
“And the gods came down?” said Lofotan. He sounded a bit drunk and quite insolent. The Longwalker did not seem to mind.
“Not the gods. The Eye.”
All through the crowd of kender the word
“What is the Eye?” Balif asked.
“The handiwork of the Makers,” the Longwalker replied. “A great oval stone in the sky, faceted like cave crystal, and the color of smoke.”
Treskan dropped his stylus. Mathi stooped to retrieve it for him.
“The Eye came down to the lodestone mountain. Though it was not bright, it burned the sky as it came. It drove Fina and Rufus off Aereera. They ran and behind them the slopes of the mountain ran like water. Great crowds of the People stood waiting for the two to return. When they saw the Eye descend, they fled for safety, but no place was safe. Houses burned, forests went up like kindling, and stone mountains melted like lead in a crucible. Fina herself was burned to ashes, but Rufus escaped.”
“How?”
“While running through the valley of Nepsas, below Mount Aereera, he saw a wide cleft in the rocks. He crawled in. There was a deep passage through the ground there, and many hundreds of the People followed him to escape the wrath of the Eye.
“The Eye pressed against the doors of the cleft, but the stone was so hard, it could not melt it. It tried so hard and so long that it wore out its anger at having been pulled down from the sky. The unseen fire faded away, leaving a cool and calmer Eye hovering over the mouth of the cave.
“‘Since you seek the world’s protection, go forth and find it,’ said the Eye. The crack in the ground deepened. Rufus and the People in the cleft went down and down, then up and up. It took so long for them to find the up from the down that babies were born along the way, and the babies of babies. I, myself, was born in the cleft. I have the mark of it, see?”
The Longwalker parted the seams of his dusty robe, revealing a large, angular scar on his chest. It could have been made by anything, and the kender chief did not elaborate on how he got it.
“One day while we were climbing up, the Eye spoke through the hollow core of the world and said, ‘You have taken a long walk, my children. Let the first one out into the new day lead you into the light.’
“I was the first of the People to see the sky of today. I am the Longwalker. I led the people out of the down and into the up.” He paused as if finished.
Balif was listening raptly, a fist pressed against his lips. “This happened in your lifetime? How long ago?” he murmured.
Serius tugged a tuft of weathered hair. “When this was long and glossy.” Kender didn’t observe calendars. Assuming the Longwalker was a spry age for a kender-seventy-five or eighty-it sounded as if the wanderfolk had arrived in the past forty years or so.
“We were not the same folk when we came out of the up as when we went into the down,” the Longwalker continued. “The people of the land around the circle were bigger and less handsome-not as big as you elder folk, I guess.”
“Who else would your ancestors be?” Lofotan said. “Not humans!”
Treskan said a single word. Mathi did not understand it, and she repeated it more loudly than the scribe intended. “Gnomes? What are gnomes?” she said. “The parent race of the wanderfolk?” Balif said thoughtfully
“Maybe. Don’t know.” The Longwalker sat down. “The stories say we were bigger, and passing through the down made us better sized.”
Treskan wrote wildly. His stylus flew across the sheet, leaving a slanting trail of ink scratches that Mathi could not fathom. He seemed awfully excited about hearing a silly traveler’s tale.
