The dwarf now properly chastened, Zulkeh ordered him to manufacture some suitable sack in which to stow the possessions in question. And so did the apprentice set about this newfound task.
Here, as well, his labors were long and arduous. For the wizard himself possessed no cloth of a size sufficient to make such a sack. Thus was Shelyid perforce required to descend into the catacombs, gravely disturbing, your narrator is pained to relate, the slumbers of the dead. For the apprentice did tumble out of their eternal resting place many a skeleton and many a mummy, seeking, by the collection of their burial shrouds, to amass together a quantity of cloths out of which he could manufacture the great sack.
Alas, these labors seemed in vain. The dwarf was no more nimble-fingered than he was nimble-witted. His attempts at cutting and sewing, not to mention the more subtle of the tailoring arts, were inept in the extreme. Of course, this proved to be something of a boon. For the dwarf was, by virtue of his clumsiness, blessed with a most educational lecture on the part of his master. Zulkeh sat in his chair in the study, observing the gnome at his work, and lightened Shelyid’s labors with a lengthy monologue on the subject of bungling and botchery, opening up to the dwarf’s understanding various theoretical and historical subtleties of the question which had heretofore escaped Shelyid’s attention, this, though the subject itself was actually one of the more frequent of the mage’s topics of discourse.
Then, the sack at last stitched and knotted together, in a most crude and unsightly fashion, the apprentice discovered that his labors not only seemed to be, but were in actual fact, in vain. For no sooner had but the fourth part of the mage’s belongings been stuffed into the sack than this would-be conveyance ripped at a dozen places, disgorging its would-be contents back onto the floor of the study.
In fairness to the dwarf, it should be said that the fault lay not with his seam-manship. Indeed, his rough-hewn seams were the only places where the sack did not rip. The fault lay rather in the fact, now obvious to the slow-witted Shelyid—especially with the wizard’s accompanying and most lucid exposition on the related subjects of idiocy and cretinism to assist him in his reasoning—that the moldy and worm-eaten shrouds of the long dead are not, all things considered, the most suitable material out of which to forge a sturdy traveling sack designed to carry objects not only of vast multitude and great collective weight, but sporting many sharp points and edges as well.
“But master, I don’t have anything else to make a sack from,” whined the dwarf.
“Bah!” oathed the mage. Zulkeh rose from his chair and stalked over to a shelf, from which he drew forth a book and a box.
“Thoughtless lout!” The mage extended the box to Shelyid. “Have you forgotten this?”
Shelyid gingerly took the box.
“But, master, you told me never to open this box. So I don’t know what’s in it.”
“Do not attempt to excuse your ignorance with ignorance, wretched gnome! Of course I forbade you to open the box, for it contains nothing less valuable than the hide of a guthfish.”
Shelyid’s brow furrowed.
“What’s a guthfish?”
“Lazy dwarf! The nature of said magical piscoid is recounted in this penetrating volume by the Potentates Laebmauntsforscynneweëld, The Guthfish of Grotum, its history and natural philosophy.”
The wizard now extended the book.
“Had you but read this tome—instead of lolling about in idleness—it would have opened up to your understanding the divers uses of the creature’s hide as well as the strange and wonderful characteristics thereof.”
“But, master, you told me never to read that book, lest I should be felled in my mind—actually you said the cluttered pit which passes for my mind—by the subtle and cunning things which are contained therein.”
“Bah!” oathed the mage. “Do you seek to excuse your disobedience with obedience?”
Zulkeh thrust the book into Shelyid’s hands.
“Read this, unworthy wretch!—and proceed to fashion the sack according to its instructions.”
“Yes, master,” sighed the dwarf, seating himself on his stool.