Chapter 4

Phineas wiped the night’s grit from his eyes with a corner of his white smock as he clomped down the wooden stairs, headed for his office below. Grimacing, he smacked his lips. His mouth had an awful, metallic taste, as if he’d been sucking on a rusty sword. Undoubtedly residue from the pitcher of kender ale he’d drunk before falling asleep last night, he decided.

After opening the door to his examination room at the foot of the stairs, he quickly lit the stub of a candle in the darkened room and headed straight for the counter that contained the green glass bottle of his own special elixir. It was Phineas’s cure for anything that couldn’t be covered up with a bandage, ear plugs, or oiled parchment glasses, or pulled out like teeth or in-grown toenails. He prescribed it for headaches, stomachaches, foot aches, joint aches, sore throats, bulging eyes, rashes, bad breath, swollen tongues, irregularity, and a host of other ills that seemed to plague the citizens of Kendermore. Oddly enough, he’d found that the sharp-tasting liquid was actually effective against stomachaches and bad breath. He charged a dear price for his elixir, claiming that its mystical ingredients came “from dangerous lands far away, where strangers are met with the sword and the flame and seldom escape with their lives.” Kenders’ eyes would open wide as they contemplated the green bottle, and a low whistle would often escape their lips as they reached greedily for the exotic medicine.

Taking a swig now and swishing it around in his mouth, Phineas’s full cheeks jiggled with mirth. The special ingredients of his elixir were a few crushed cherry and eucalyptus leaves that he scavenged from the trash behind the neighborhood apothecary’s shop. Nothing mystical about that. Certainly he had never put a bone from a lycanthropic minotaur in any batch, as he’d told the kender the night before.

Thus remembering his visitor, Phineas’s eyes fell across the folded paper on the nearby wooden tray.

“That Trapspringer was a con artist — maybe even better than me!” the human admitted aloud, unfolding the sheet absently. It was a map. He was about to crumble it between his fists when a word on one corner fleetingly caught his attention.

The word was “treasure.”

Frowning in thought, Phineas thumbed the map open and spread it out on the counter, allowing the glow of the candle to fall over it.

He squinted in the flickering light and deduced from a smudgy title at the top that this was a map of Kendermore. But he couldn’t make out any fine details on the aged, delicate map. He needed more light.

The window in the examination room faced west, so Phineas didn’t even bother opening it; he knew he wouldn’t get any appreciable light from that direction so early in the morning. Instead, he stepped into his small waiting room and opened wide the shutters, which faced the east and the rising sun. Morning sunlight filtered in beneath a heavy canvas awning. Phineas dragged a rickety stool to the open window, spread the map out on the waiting bench, and parked his bulk on the stool. The wood creaked in protest, which usually happened when Phineas sat in anything made for a kender.

Not that he was heavy, at least by the standards of his own race. He was of average human height, with a barrel-shaped chest and rather sticklike arms and legs. His hands were lily white, and there was not an ounce of muscle on his bones. He had always been considered slight and nonthreatening among his own people.

But compared to kender, he was large, which was one of the reasons he liked living in Kendermore. Nibbling at a fingernail now, Phineas scanned the old parchment map for the word “treasure.” He scanned it again, and then a third time. Had his eyes somehow played a trick on his mind? He was sure he’d been looking at the right side of the map, near the edge. Phineas concentrated his gaze there.

“Hey, it’th Dr. Teeth!” called a high, lisping girl kender’s voice. Phineas started so violently he almost fell backward off the groaning stool. The voice’s owner poked her head under the awning to peer in the window. “Are you open?” she asked. “I have thith terrible toothache, and thinth there’th no waiting right now, you could…”

“No, I’m not ‘open’ yet,” snapped Phineas, his eyes drawn back to the map. “Do you see an ‘open’ sign in my door?”

“Well, no, but your window ith open and I thought maybe you hadn’t turned the thign yet, and my tooth hurtth real bad. Thay, what’th that? A map?”

Phineas instinctively jerked the paper from the kender’s prying eyes, then looked up. A white strip of cloth was stretched around the kender’s jaw and tied to the top of her head.

“This? Why, yes, it is a map. I’m thinking of moving my shop, and I’m simply considering new locations,” he improvised hastily. “And yes, my window is open, but I am not.”

“Well, when will you be open?” she asked, laying a hand gingerly to the left side of her jaw.

“I don’t know!” he growled impatiently. “Come back this afternoon!”

“Should I come here, or should I go to your new shop ?” Phineas looked at her strangely. Ordinarily, kender didn’t bother him, like they did most humans. But for some reason, this kender was annoying him to distraction. Perhaps it was simply a reaction to the previous evening’s excessive nightcap.

“Here!”

“OK!” she said merrily. “Bye! Thee you thith afternoon!” Waving, she grinned, but her smile disappeared immediately. Holding her sore jaw, she drifted away down the uneven, cobbled street.

Quickly, before more snooping kender could appear and pester him, Phineas pulled the map back onto his lap and studied it closely.

A street map of Kendermore looked like a box filled with writhing snakes. No two roads were parallel — or even straight — and all but the thicker, main avenues were dead ends. Phineas noted that the names on those main thoroughfares seemed to change at random. He focused his attention on one whose name he recognized as being near his shop; there it was called “Bottleneck Avenue,” two irregular blocks to the east, the same road bore the name “Straight Street” (and appeared to be anything but), and just beyond that word, the street was renamed “Bildor’s Boulevard.”

If all that weren’t confusing enough, the mapmaker had used his own symbols, which depicted such important landmarks as “Bertie’s house,” “here’s where the robin’s nest is,” and “violet patch.”

Looking at the map only made the city more confusing, Phineas decided. But asking directions from a kender was hopeless, too. “Turn right — or is it left? — at the big, green tree, then spin in place twice, go past the red geraniums — beautiful, have you seen them? -and before you know it you’re where you are!”

Again the word seemed to leap from the right edge of the map, this time hitting him squarely in the eyes. Actually, “treasure” was part of a phrase, which may have made it difficult for him to see. In full, it read, “Here be a treasure of gems and magical rings beyond compare.” Phineas’s pulse throbbed in his temples.

Snatching up a bit of coal from the small pile near his heating brazier, he circled the phrase with shaking hands. Then he noticed the symbol below it.

Beneath the glorious words was an arrow pointing to the right edge of the map, its chevron point catching exactly the lip of the sheet. With his nose less than an inch from the page, he noticed that the right edge of the map was slightly frayed, as if it had been torn along a fold.

The map had been ripped in two, and the location of the treasure was on the other half !

“No!” Phineas cried. His head moved quickly from side to side, his eyes scouring the map for a different answer, Maybe the arrow didn’t apply to the treasure. But after a few frantic moments, Phineas had to admit that it did. There was nothing else on that edge of the map. Strangely, he was fairly certain that all of Kendermore, as he knew it, was represented on the map in his hand.

Then what was on the other half of the map?

And where was it?

Phineas forced his mind to slow down. He might possibly have in his possession the find of a lifetime, He could live a long time on the sale of gems and magical rings. But he had to have the whole map to find this treasure.

Trapspringer! The kender had told him the map was one of his most prized possessions, so he obviously knew its value. Surely the odd, elder kender had the other half. But how would he find Trapspringer in the vast city of Kendermore? Phineas’s heart pounded like the sound of a hundred horses’ hooves.

Frowning, he craned his neck through the open window, then snorted at his own foolishness. The ringing in his ears wasn’t his heart at all, but an early morning parade coming down his street.

Parades — if the term were used loosely — were a daily event in Kendermore. The occasions they celebrated ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. This one was shaping up to be the former, Phineas thought sourly, taking note of the band. Five squealing fifers and three thundering cymbalists provided background noise for a middleaged kender with a black topknot, who yelled through cupped hands from a bench atop a seriously listing wagon. A banner, stretched between the hands of two scantily clad young female kender in kneehigh boots, short skirts, and low-cut blouses, proclaimed that they were promoting the election of someone or other into the mayor’s office.

“And why do we want a gynosphinx for mayor?” he yelled. “Because we’ve never had one, that’s why!

Kendermore was founded on freedom and equality — well, maybe no one said those things specifically — but we say that a gynosphinx deserves a chance! Besides, they tell good riddles!” The fifes struck a piercing trill, the cymbals crashed, and the ensemble continued down the street, yelling and cheering for the spokesman’s words.

Distracted from the map, Phineas shook his head in amusement. A gynosphinx for mayor, indeed. As far as he knew, gynosphinxes were the female of the species of creatures with lion bodies. They were almost as large as ogres, though vastly more intelligent, and they tended to devour anything that offended them. Only in Kendermore would anyone suggest such a thing. Besides, Kendermore already had a mayor, and Phineas had heard of no scheduled elections. Of course, kender seldom scheduled anything.

Kendermore already had a mayor. Phineas’s eyes darted from side to side as a thought — a recollection, really — congealed in his brain. Trapspringer had said some very strange, contradictory things the night before. He’d said that he was being held in prison. But he’d also said that his nephew was marrying the mayor’s daughter. Had one or both statements been the rambling of a crazy old kender? The two could not possibly be connected. Nevertheless, in the absence of any other clues, it seemed that Phineas’s best chance to find Trapspringer might lay with the mayor, whoever he was. A smile of pure delight and anticipation spread across his middleaged face.

In the wake of the parade, kender had begun appearing before his window.

“Dr. Bones —”

“I need a haircut and —”

Forced to acknowledge their raucous presence, Phineas asked abruptly, “Say, do any of you know where I might find the mayor?”

“City Hall!” they sang out.

“Thanks,” he said tersely. “I’m closed today, because of the holiday — the parade, and gynosphinxes, and all that.” With that he swung the shutters closed in the kender’s tiny, surprised faces. He could hear their sputtering taunts, but his mind was already on its way to City Hall to locate either a crazy man or — Phineas couldn’t think of an ‘or.’