I looked.
So, alright already, maybe it wasn’t a dog. Maybe instead it was a red fox. So what if it wasn’t snarling and attacking. So what if it was merely sitting and waiting, its tongue lolling from grinning mouth. Still, it could have torn me to shreds, it could have ripped out my throat, it could have slashed my jugular veins. And it did seem to be licking its chops as it eyed me.
I looked at Tynvyr, too, her with a tentative smile on her face, standing beside the sitting fox, reaching up and holding tightly to its collar.
“Tame?” I asked.
She nodded, still grinning hesitantly, though she kept a firm grip.
“Not dangerous?”
Solemnly, she shook her head, pulling back on the collar as the fox seemed to strain forward.
“Rufous?”
Her timorous smile returned, and she nodded, Rufous salivating, licking his chops. She reached up and tapped the fox on the nose, and he looked sideways at her, a bit disgruntled, but seemed to settle down. At least he stopped the licking.
Somewhat reassured, I looked up at three-foot-five Dando. “So turn me loose, oh tall one.”
“Look, Mister …” Dando paused, staring down at me.
“Bork,” I supplied.
“ … Mister Bork,” he continued smoothly, “I judge you are going to have to pay for”—he waved his hand vaguely in the general direction of everywhere—“the meal and broken dishes and spilled ale. After all it was you who crashed into me.”
“You should have warned me about the dog,” I said, supremely.
“It’s a fox,” he replied.
“Fox shmox, still you should have warned me.”
“Mister Bork, I told you that we have nothing dangerous here in the inn”—he cast a surreptitious glance at the cabinet in the hall, the one whence came the rattle—“I specifically said that we have no owls, cats, rats, dogs, bats, hawks, weasels, cobras, and no mongooses or mongeese.”
“Well, what about rattly snakes?” I didn’t know what a rattly snake was but—
“No. They’re all gone. Indeed. Yessir. No mice either.”
He paused a moment and then said, “Tell you what: you pay half, I’ll pay half, and we’ll call it even.”
I thought it over, eyeing the fox. The fox licked its chops and smiled. I flinched.
“See?” crowed Dando, having witnessed my reaction to Rufous.
“Alright, alright, your tallness,” I said. “You’ve proved your point.”
Dando smiled and bustled off for a broom and a mop and bucket, and to fetch me another meal.
“What is he?” I asked Rafferty as I watched Dando walk away. “Pointy ears, slanty jewellike eyes, Halfling sized. I’d call him an Elf, but for his eyes and his size.”
“Wellanow, laddie,” said Rafferty as he stared at Marley frantically scrubbing the back of his hand where a single tiny droplet of flung stew had landed on the Gnome, “Dando, he’s what y’ moight call a Warrow, or some sich. Nobody t’ fool about with, them Warrows, from what I hear. Especially whin riled.”
From behind came a comment. “They are much more prone to violence than my folk.”
I turned about. The speaker was Bigfoot. “We live in small hamlets,” he added, “much the same as they do, but we’d rather eat and sleep and work in our gardens, whereas they hunt and herd and farm and shoot bows and arrows and at times are rather warlike. Fierce, you might say, and active. They are, indeed, Elflike, but they live only a hundred and twenty years or so, in contrast with Elves, who live forever if you believe the tales. I’m not certain that I do, what with all the travel I’ve done, the many and varied quests and great adventures that I’ve undertaken, throughout all the lands and across all the oceans, cities and hamlets and woodlands and intricate underground caverns and halls and …”
He droned on and on, never shutting up. My meal came and went, and still he rambled on, endlessly, circuitously, tortuously … torturously, too, all the while jotting notes in a journal, recording, I believe, what he was saying at that very moment. Drone, drone, drone. Scribble, scribble, scribble. Drone, scribble, drone. I never did find out his name. Bigfoot would have to do.
He didn’t even notice when we all got up and left, he just kept right on talking and writing and writing and talking, simultaneously, never missing a beat.
Maybe instead of shoes for Bigfoot, I’d take that cowhide and make a full-body gag for him.
I’d consider it on the morrow if he was still talking, and I was sure he would be.
As I was escorted up the spiral stairs to my room by another tall Warrow, this one a female (a damman, I believe they’re called), I saw Dando down on the floor with a forked stick and a gunny sack cautiously peering and poking a broom handle under the foot of the cabinet where the rattling sound had come from.
The next morning, when I came downstairs, the inn was—how shall I put this?—the inn was elsewhere.
Where? … I don’t know, though someone said we were near a Shire.
But Bigfoot was gone, waddled off across the countryside a couple of hours ago, going home, said Tynvyr, and now this dreadful black rider was coming down the road, and Dando was severely alarmed, and so we got the Hèl out of there.
Dando slammed the door in the guy’s face, and twisted at his own left hand, and the windows got all sparkly and glittery, and everything inside got dark, even though when last I looked it was daylight outside.
The dammen (several female Warrows) lighted lanterns and candles. But I went to the windows and cupped my hands to shade out the light and tried to peer through.
I almost went cross-eyed.
Beyond the glass there were strange cyclopean shapes twisting obscenely in what I knew had to be a cruel, etheric, icy void, and the cold phosphorescent luminance beyond was cosmic and singular, a hideous unknown blend of colour, a colour out of—
I wrenched my cross-eyed gaze from the glass and whirled about dizzily, stumbling and staggering to a nearby table, plopping down beside two Marleys the Gnome, who at that moment was complaining about the filthy clean white towels in his and Rafferty’s room, eyeing the Leprechaun as if he were dungeon slime.
Too, Marley seemed obsessed with where the toilets flushed, and where the water came from, claiming that it was one and the same place.
Hey, good questions, I thought, as I eyed Rufous and he eyed me, the fox licking his chops and checking to see if Tynvyr was looking (she was). Where did the water come from and where did the toilets flush to? This inn can’t have a well or a septic system, the whole building flying around as it does from perdition to who knows where.
Rafferty supplied the answer. “Marley, m’ bucko, don’t y’ know? Th’ handpumps are magic, drawing their water from cool mountain streams in th’ land far to th’ west. Wan o’ these days, somewan will most loikely settle nearby and brew th’ most wanderful beer from th’ very same waters, Cor, if I do say so meself.
“And as to th’ privies, wellanow, they flush magically, too, droppin’ their loads in th’ marshy meadowlands o’ th’ east coast o’ th’ very same western land far away.
“Why, laddie, the Halfling House itself is a powerful magic artifact, able to travel here and there and in between th’ very ‘dimensions’ themselves, or so I hear, whatever ‘tis that a ‘dimension’ might be, for I don’t even know what’t is they might be talkin’ about whin they use that word ‘dimension.’ But regardless o’ the meaning o’ that word, we do know f’r a fact that th’ Halfling House does go thither and yon, and from place to place. How it’s controlled, this Halfling House, what device or object is used to cause it to go from wan place to anither … wellanow, I have me suspicions, but I’ll keep them to meself.”