It called to the kender like the smell of honey to a bear.
The perfect time to search for the passage was, of course, while the geysers were venting. All the gnomes would be hiding underground, and he could slip away unnoticed. He might even run into a giant by accident in the fog, and he was pretty certain it wasn’t breaking the rules if you just happened across a giant.
As he crept down a deserted, fog-shrouded street, he paused at a corner to consult a map by the light of a nearby lava pool. Warm sweat dripped from his forehead down his pointed” nose and onto the parchment covered with his own cartographical scrawls. During his search for iron parts to repair the Indestructible, he had made careful observations of his surroundings and committed them to maps. Marked in red on these maps were those places he most wanted to explore, in green those places he sort of wanted to explore, and in blue those places Sir Tanar had already explored (with Razmous secretly following him), but which still contained interesting nooks and crannies that the wizard had probably overlooked.
It was toward one of these places in blue ink that he was heading, since it was nearest the ship. It was a pile of rubble cast up against the dressed stone wall of the cavern. Sir Tanar had poked around in it for a while, probably hoping to find dead bodies or some other nasty thing to use in his spells. Razmous didn’t believe that it contained anything of that sort, though if it did, it certainly would be interesting. Instead, he believed it might cover an entrance or possibly even an exit.
Satisfied that he was on the right track, Razmous continued on his way, arriving a few minutes later at the site. It appeared to be nothing more than a pile of rubble extending more than halfway across the broad avenue, heaped up to a height of forty or fifty feet against the wall.
He avoided the loose piles of stone at the edges and went straight for the larger boulders nearer the wall. By turning sidewise and rearranging his pouches, he was able to slip between a promising pair and found himself, after a tight squeeze and a scramble over some loose gravel, in a long, tube-shaped cavern bearded with long pointed stalactites and prickled with short, stumpy stalagmites. The nearest of these looked to have been worn down to little more than a nub of its former self, and it appeared to have been blackened by fire. The far end of the tunnel, though hazy with smoke, was lit by a flickering blood-red glow.
Smiling, Razmous strode forward, and painfully stubbed his toes against the skull of some gigantic, ugly humanoid. Its heavy brow thrust out over a flattened, crooked nose and large, misshapen mouth filled with a hideous snarl of yellow teeth, some of which had fallen out. The skull was nearly as large as the kender and twice as heavy. Nearby lay a rib cage large enough to hold a bear. Razmous crawled inside, sat down, removed his boot, and massaged his bruised piggies. A reddish gleam near the wall caught his eye, and brushing aside some ancient cobwebs, he removed a large, dry, dusty crimson scale. He examined it for a moment before dropping it into one of his pouches, slipping his foot into his boot, and continuing on his way.
The cavern was much longer than he’d imagined. By the time he reached the farther end, Razmous was dusty, bedraggled, and thoroughly exhausted. His topknot hung like a limp rag over his nose, stray strands of hair clinging to his parched lips and the gummy corners of his eyes.
Yet he didn’t mind, not at all. The trip had been worth every scraped shinbone, crushed toe, and skinned knuckle, for below him, at the base of a long broad slope, lay the red dragon.
Reorx’s Black Boots! What a dragon. Razmous had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting, “How do you do?” He’d seen the dragon for only a few moments three weeks ago when it attacked them: once as it breathed fire on two of his companions-that had been interesting, though very sad-and once as it peered through the portholes of the ship. Of course, in both cases, he’d only caught a glimpse. Now, the dragon lay stretched out on a bed of gold and steel coins, snoozing like a cat before a warm hearth.
Even farther below lay the lake of fire, and in its midst was the island where the dragon’s egg still lay atop its comparatively smaller pile of treasure. The dragon’s lair was high up near the cavern’s roof, where it could keep watch over its egg. Razmous noted the cleverness of this plan, nodding in appreciation of how exposed and vulnerable they had been when approaching the egg.
His eyes flickered back to the dragon and drank in the sight, burning it into his memory so that he could sit before a fire some day and tell others of what he had seen. Razmous was rather young for a kender, only being twenty years or so into his wanderlust-the peculiar urge to see the world firsthand that most kender begin to feel in their early twenties. Being so young, he had little memory of how things were before the coming of the great dragons and the subsequent Dragon Purge. He could count on two fingers the dragons he had seen before this one-Malys, whom he had glimpsed only from a distance, and Pyrothraxus, whom he had seen up close and personal during his visits to Mount Nevermind. But even Pyrothraxus, who was much smaller than Malys, dwarfed this dragon by many wingspans. This dragon was a house cat to Pyrothraxus’s tiger. Nevertheless, Razmous could not help but be overcome by the majesty and beauty of the red creature. Even though it was evil. Very evil.
The unimaginable wealth that lay all about the dragon caught his eye. He could not suppress a sigh, fingering the gold in his mind, already seeming to feel the weight of it dragging at the straps of his pouches. It wasn’t some kind of dwarven greediness that he felt, kindled by the sight of all that wealth. It was the desire to be able to slap down a coin on a bar, hitch his thumbs behind his suspenders-he’d have to start wearing suspenders first-and tell everyone that the coin came from a dragon’s lair.
It wasn’t like he was going to steal it from the dragon, Razmous reasoned. He’d return it someday. Now that he knew where he could find a dragon, he imagined he’d come back many times just to look at it. He could return the coins then, after he was finished telling everyone who would listen about the time he borrowed a pouch full of coins from a dragon. Yes, that was it! That was it perfectly. There couldn’t be a better plan. He’d just slip down there, he thought as he started down the slope, moving as quietly as only a kender can move. Slip down there and…
Of course, this white-hot pain shooting through his back wasn’t part of the plan, nor his knees betraying him and going off in different directions. He fell heavily on his rump, then toppled over on his face. Some of the precious things in his pouches spilled out on the stone floor, and the rounder objects-a silver salt shaker from the Sailor’s Rest in Flotsam (how had that got in there?), a small steel coin with a hole punched through the middle for a string, a spool of green thread-rolled down the slope, picking up speed and noise as they neared the dragon.
Slowly, one of the dragon’s great heavy eyelids lifted and stared at the three tiny round intruders as they rolled to a stop at the edge of its treasure bed.