Conundrum (dс-1) by Jeff Crook

Author:Jeff Crook [Crook, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy

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Razmous Pinchpocket ran for his life, as only a kender can run when a troll is hot on his heels. He could almost feel its hot, reeking breath on his neck as his topknot cracked like a flag in the wind of his speed. The dark forest flashed by, and he dodged, dipped, ducked, and leaped like a whirling dervish, avoiding low-hanging branches that would have brained him, groping roots that would have tripped him, and looming trunks that would have pulverized him had he run into them head on.

And he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

There is nothing that makes a kender feel quite so alive as the hot breath of doom blowing down his shorts. Perhaps it is the nearness of death that makes the creatures so enjoy life, like the condemned prisoner who treasures every moment, every glimmer of the sun off the spider-webs in his cell, the taste of the earth in the stale bread and rank water that is his last meal. The kender race is without fear, a trait that gives them their power and indeed their very nature, their spirit, their reason for living, and at the same time usually leads to their demise. For it is lack of fear that makes them such intrepid travelers, and it is lack of fear that provides the only real check on their population. The kender are too peaceful and good-natured to involve themselves in war, too clever with their hands in other peoples pockets to ever starve, and too mobile to be threatened by plague. The normal limiting factors that keep most civilizations from destroying themselves utterly or so theorize the gnomes of the Philosophers” Guild, are completely absent from the kender race because of their very nature. So the gods made them fearless, to keep them from ruling the world.

But Razmous wasn’t thinking of all this as he fled from the troll. He was thinking of his leap. He must time the leap perfectly, or else end up on top of an angry troll at the bottom of a very deep, sword-lined hole.

Of course, it had come to him as he sat in the briars looking at the troll stalking round his dangling friends, that the badgers and hedgehogs had built their trap to catch trolls, among other things. Nothing else could explain the trap’s gargantuan scale, its huge stones, and wide, deep, sword-lined pit. And he thought, if I can get the troll to chase me to the pit, maybe I can get him to fall into it, too. Of course, there is always the danger that the limb will break, or that I will miss it in the dark, or that I won’t be able to leap the hole…

Really, he reminded himself, he had been around gnomes for far too long. He was almost beginning to think like a gnome, more concerned with a thousand possibilities and designing against what might go wrong than concentrating on making it go right-or at least trying to make it go right.

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