“What will milk of… milk of… what will it do?” Conundrum asked as the doctor joined Sir Grumdish in his labors.
“Make you forget you are sick,” Doctor Bothy grunted in answer. “But a glass of regular old cold cow’s milk would do me just fine-or better yet, a bowl of vanilla-flavored frozen-sugar-cream.” He smacked his lips, then continued to dig.
Soon, the two gnomes had excavated a sizeable hole in the loamy forest floor. They towed the wet, heavy bag of haggis into it, and within another turn of the glass were tamping down a small mound of freshly turned black earth with the flats of their shovels. Sir Grumdish stood up, his old gnomish joints cracking with the effort. He stowed the two shovels in his pack, then looked to the kender.
But Razmous and Conundrum were busy staring at something off through the trees. “What is that?” Sir Grumdish whispered, stepping closer and peering over Conundrum’s shoulder.
“It just appeared,” Conundrum breathed in awe.
“It looks like a cottage,” the kender said. “A cottage made of-”
“Vanilla-flavored frozen-sugar-cream!” Doctor Bothy finished for him.
“Looks more like custard to me,” Conundrum offered.
“I was going to say butter,” Razmous said.
Doctor Bothy laughed and ran past his companions. “Don’t be ridiculous! Who ever heard of a cottage made of butter?” he cried, his last words fading away even as he disappeared into the darkness.
Despite his girth, the doctor displayed an unexpected agility and speed. No one could keep up with him, not even the nimble-footed kender. They raced after him as best they could while being careful not to brain themselves against some tree in the dark. But Doctor Bothy leaped and darted through wood and glen like some fey creature out of a dream.
He reached the cottage before any of the others, and they found him already eating his way through one of the walls. A strange, yellow light emanated from the interior of the cottage, setting it aglow in the midst of the woods. Doctor Bothy turned at Razmous’s shout, creamy goo dripping from his beard and the tip of his nose, and coating his arms up to the elbows.
“It ith fanitha-flaforefh frothenthugarcreamfh!” he shouted with his cheeks bulging full of frozen dessert.
“Truly?” Razmous cried with delight. He dearly loved vanilla-flavored frozen-sugar-cream, even more than the greediest gnome.
“Un-hungh!” the doctor moaned in ecstasy.
Razmous started forward, but Sir Grumdish pulled him back by the shoulder of his green vest. “Not so fast, kender!” he snarled, pushing Razmous into Conundrum’s arms. “Here, hold onto him and don’t let him go. I’m going after Doctor Bothy before anything happens. Something uncanny is afoot here.”
With that, he stomped off toward the doctor, who was even then teetering on his toes in an effort to sink his teeth into the fudge drooping from the eaves of the cottage.
Suddenly, Doctor Bothy gripped his ears, squeezed his head in his hands, and staggered back with a cry. Sir Grumdish rushed forward and steadied him, crying, “What’s the matter? Are you injured? Poisoned? Magicked?”
The doctor shook his head and tried to push Sir Grumdish away. “It’s nothing. A frozen-sugar-cream headache is all.”
Before Sir Grumdish could give voice to his annoyance with the doctor, a queer tittering giggle echoed through the forest. The doctor looked up in surprise. Sir Grumdish looked down. Conundrum heard it right in front of his face, so near that he fell backward over a log. But Razmous spun around, peering into the forest behind them. He heard the giggling everywhere.
Then, with a pop like a cork from a bottle of gigglehiccup, the magical house disappeared. Two more loud pops followed in succession, one for Doctor Bothy, and the second for Sir Grumdish, who vanished even as he was turning in surprise at the sudden and noisy disappearance of the good doctor. Razmous and Conundrum stared in horror for a moment at the now empty forest clearing, then turned, and without any clear purpose or direction, fled screaming into the night.
That is to say, Conundrum fled screaming. Razmous, being a kender, wasn’t exactly frightened. Instead, he was mightily concerned, and he ran calling, “Doctor Bothy! Sir Grumdish!” in his loud ringing kender voice. No one answered, and he didn’t wait around to listen. It was all he could do to keep up with his gnome companion.
Conundrum knew not in which direction he fled, whether toward Jachim or away from it. Neither was he particularly frightened, yet he felt almost as if some extra-terrestrial power had taken over his body and was hurling him as fast as his legs could carry him through a dark and fearsome forest.
Suddenly-and rather painfully-he caught his toe against a old gnarled root splaying across the path, and down he went. He threw out his hands to catch his fall and felt them sink up to his armpits in the soft leafy mold. But it didn’t stop there. Down, down he fell, leaves and twigs and a spatter of loosened soil pouring down around him, and it was some moments before he realized he was sliding on his belly down a long stony slide that led deep underground.
Of course, what Razmous saw was Conundrum fall headfirst into nothingness, disappearing without even an accompanying pop. Instinctively, the kender leaped up and caught hold of a low-hanging limb. Looking down between his kicking feet, he found himself dangling over an ever-widening hole, a forest trap door with a honest-to-goodness stone slide leading downward to who knew what awful kind of awful doom.
So, naturally, he had to explore further. Obviously, Conundrum had gone that way, and if the doom was particularly awful, the little gnome would need help. With a shrill squeal of delight, the kender let go of the branch and fell with a thud down the hole.
As he slid down the sloping tunnel on his rear end, Razmous noticed a blue light glowing somewhere below, and moments later a dark squat figure lurking in the middle of the slide. He slid smack into Conundrum, who, being lighter and falling from a lesser height, had less momentum to carry him all the way to the slide’s bottom. The scale and construction of the trap bespoke of a design for much larger creatures and not light-boned peoples like gnomes or kender. Conundrum had slid to a stop many feet yet from the slide’s end-wherever it was that it ended-but now Razmous, being a little bigger and with the added momentum of plunging from the higher height of the tree, swept into him with a loud oof! Down the two continued, Conundrum on top, Razmous below, rubbing to the thickness of a few threads the seat of the latter’s breeches against the stones.
Slowly, they ground to a halt a few feet from the end of the slide. Razmous pushed Conundrum out of his lap and leaped up, swatting at his behind and hopping around on one foot. Spotting a trickle of water running down one of the walls, he backed against the wall and stood there sighing, his eyelids fluttering.
Meanwhile, Conundrum investigated their surroundings. The slide came to an end at the edge of a deep, dank pit, from the sides of which protruded numerous old rusty sword blades and spear heads, all set into the stone at a downward angle as though to prevent those falling into the pit from climbing out. The strange blue glow they had noticed earlier had turned red as blood, but even as Conundrum looked round and Razmous cooled his stone-chafed hindquarters, it began to change to a cool dim violet. The glow originated from a multitude of tiny worms feeding on moss growing on the walls and stony roof overhead. Each worm glowed with blue or red phosphorescence, but as Conundrum examined them, more and more of the red ones turned blue.
Razmous joined him in peering at the curious little worms, then very gently allowed several to crawl onto his outstretched fingers. He giggled at the feel of the tiny creatures nosing about the creases of his palm.