First he ordered two of the guards to repaint his room a deep indigo blue—by sundown. Afterward, staring at the deep indigo blue that covered the floor, walls, and ceiling, Tas almost fell asleep. So he decided that deep indigo blue was a tad too lulling.
He ordered the same two guards to repaint the room a bright crimson—by sundown of the next day. The guards grumbled and swore, especially because Tas poked at them, swatted their heads, and berated them as they slaved to meet the deadline.
Bright crimson kept the kender wide awake at night. So Tas decided that the floor could stay crimson, if it was covered with some rugs—he wouldn't be noticing the floor much at night anyway—but the walls ought to be some substantial color, like orange, while the ceiling ought to be some profoundly evil color, like midnight black.
The same two minotaur guards, because they had done such a good job the first two times and also because they had done such a bad job the first two times, were selected to repaint Tasslehoff's room again.
All the minotaur guards complained bitterly among themselves about Tasslehoff. No matter why or when they entered the kender's quarters, they were likely to be struck by some flying object or tackled from behind or tripped by wire strung across their path. Insults—the worst insults Tas could think of, comparisons to dumb cows and dull-horned bulls—poured out nonstop. Food was rejected and tossed in their faces.
Dogz, the only minotaur who managed to avoid being poked or insulted, sadly remembered the good old Tasslehoff, before he had turned evil.
Tasslehoff Burrfoot is a valued minion of the Nightmaster," Fesz had declared. And the minotaur guards dared not disagree.
To Fesz, Tas's hostile and aggressive behavior was proof positive that the kender had turned evil. And if his obnoxious behavior wasn't evidence enough, Tasslehoff also had proved extremely cooperative in telling Fesz a great deal about the thin, intelligent mage from Solace who had sent him to Southern Ergoth to obtain the rare jalopwort from a minotaur herbalist.
Tas also told Fesz all about his good friends, Flint and Tanis Half-Elven, and his Uncle Trapspringer, and the time he, Tas, had almost captured a woolly mammoth single-handedly. He told him about poor Sturm and Caramon, probably carcasses picked over by spiny fish at the bottom of the Blood Sea by now. It was good riddance to bad rubbish, because they were honorable and pure and wouldn't fit in with the kender's new way of looking at the world as something to be stomped on and mashed and conquered.
Indeed, the kender loved to talk about his friends—"ex-friends," he sometimes corrected himself. He especially loved to talk about the dwarf, Flint Fireforge. So much did he love to talk about Flint that occasionally Fesz had to put his arm around the kender and gently steer him back to the subject of Raistlin Majere, the enemy of the minotaur race and therefore, Fesz reminded him, an enemy of Tas's.
Raistlin Majere was the one who interested Fesz the most. This human who was studying to be a mage, and who had wanted the jalopwort because of a spell he had stumbled across in some ancient text.
"Oh, Raistlin is very smart, you bet," Tas told Fesz. "A pretty good mage, considering that he hasn't taken the Test yet, but don't ask me what the Test is, because it's something very secret, and although I know more about it than practically anybody else, it ties my tongue just to try to explain it. If Raistlin's figured out where the jalopwort went—meaning, where I am, here in Minotaurville—then he's probably on his way here right now. He'll want the jalopwort back, and probably he'll want to rescue me, too—hah! Probably Tanis and Flint will be coming with him. Boy, Flint will get a big kick out of how evil I am before I kill him!
"But you're right, Fesz. Raistlin is the real threat. I think you and I better start to figure out how to trap him and choke him and stab him and then maybe do something really evil to his dead body, like—I don't know. You've got more experience than I do in this sort of thing. What do you suggest?"
Whenever the kender got really excited, as he was now, he paced the room, bouncing up and down with an unmistakably wide, wicked leer. It made Fesz feel pleased. Furthermore, it was usually an appropriate time to give the kender another dose of the potion that would keep him evil as long as Tas kept drinking it.
Tas had been extremely cooperative and very evil for about a week now. Fesz had written down everything the kender said that related to Raistlin and the jalopwort, and dispatched the essence of what he learned across the channel to the Nightmaster on the island of Karthay. Even though the kender was evil, he was still insatiably curious about everything. He begged Fesz to reveal how he managed to communicate with the Nightmaster.
One afternoon, feeling rather fatherly toward Tas, the shaman minotaur escorted the kender into his quarters to show him where he lived.
"Hey, how come you have a bigger room than I do?" asked Tasslehoff, looking around indignantly. "You've got nicer paintings and bigger windows, too—and two windows! I love the color combination you've chosen—a simple brown and dark green combination, like trees and leaves. It reminds me of a forest, in fact. Those stupid minotaur guards have had me all confused with crimson and blue and orange. When I get back, I'm going to give them a piece of my mind."
Fesz put his arm around the irrepressibly wicked kender with whom he was feeling more and more of a kinship and led him to the windowsill. On the sill sat a large round jar of unusually corpulent bees with unusually long stingers. They swarmed inside the jar, buzzing noisily.
"These super-intelligent bees bear my messages to the Nightmaster,"
