the damp.
'Ash,' said Mumchance, stirring up a cloud with his booted foot. 'Floor was burned long ago.'
'Bones, too,' reported Kid, skipping back into the circle of light. 'Old bones, my dears, scorched skulls and blackened ribs.'
'Kid, stay away from those,' Ivy snapped. He ignored her, continuing to poke among the piles.
Gunderal walked up to one of the black columns and rubbed her good hand across it. She left a white streak shining in the lamplight. 'Soot,' she said, displaying the black marks on the ends of her delicate fingers. She frowned at the mess on her fingers and pulled a lace handkerchief out of her pocket to clean off the grime. 'A fire storm inside. It smells like magic, Ivy.'
'How long ago? Is it gone now?' Ivy wondered if it could be a lingering spell or curse, something that could collapse the place on top of them if they touched some forbidden object.
Gunderal whispered a few words and tilted her head and gave the slightest of sniffs, as if she were trying to smell a faded perfume in a room long abandoned. 'Before we were born- before our mothers or our grandmothers,' she said, shrugging and wincing as the gesture pulled at her arm sling.
'Speak for your own grandparents,' said Mumchance. 'Mine probably carved these pillars. Look at the fluting on the base, Ivy, that's good clean stonework. Dwarves carved that; humans wouldn't have the patience for it.'
'Men can build and carve well, if they desire it,' said Sanval, coming up to them with a solid rap of hard boot heels against stone. Ivy thought about pointing out that his firm tread was stirring up more ash, which was settling back down on his beautifully polished boots. But she decided not to comment, not until his boots looked exceptionally bad.
'There were great temples and palaces in Tsurlagol once, before it fell,' continued Sanval. 'Not all were built by dwarves.'
'I still say it is quality work, and that generally means dwarves,' said Mumchance. 'Tsurlagol was always a steady source of income for those inclined to work with humans. The city's name became another word for 'job available' among dwarves. After all, the humans needed it rebuilt so many times.'
Ignoring the arguments, Ivy asked the important question. 'So we're in Tsurlagol?'
'In the ruins of some earlier Tsurlagol, I think,' said Sanval slowly, as if he were dredging up an old story from his memory. 'This city has been destroyed and rebuilt so often, it can be hard to know one level from the next. There are tales of fire once destroying Tsurlagol, sweeping through the city. A fire begun by wizards. It burned so wildly and so free that they finally buried the city under the earth to stifle it.'
'Earth magic and fire magic,' said Gunderal. 'I can smell traces of it in this place. But both extinguished now. And something else too, something even older. Something strange, that pulls on the Weave in a way that I do not recognize.'
'So how far are we from present day Tsurlagol?' asked Ivy, whose interest in history had never been strong and tended to be even less when she was trapped underground and had missed her breakfast and had little hope of lunch.
'Outside the walls still,' said Mumchance. 'We've been traveling too far to the north to be under the current city. That's what I think, and I'm usually right.'
'Yes, and a disgusting habit that is too,' replied Ivy. She rubbed her eyes-the old ash kicked up by her passage made her itchy-and peered into the gloom. 'Best way out?'
'Many ways, my dear,' said Kid, trotting back and forth like a restless racehorse. 'East, west, south, north. Lots of tunnels going out of here. Bigger than the way we came. Men and dwarves have been down here since this burned and been busy, busy, busy digging away. Others have come since. Animals slithering on bellies, four-foot and two-foot and no-foot, hunting behind the humans and dwarves. Old tracks overlaying older tracks, all hunting one another.' Kid's tongue flickered in and out of his mouth, as if he tasted all those passages in the air itself.
'At least there are not any rats,' said Zuzzara, who had a strong dislike of rodents. It was Gunderal who always had to clean out the rattraps in the barn, unless she could talk somebody else into doing it.
'Too many reptiles, my dear,' said Kid, bending over to examine a small pile of bones.
'Reptiles?' said Gunderal, who had a bigger dislike of snakes than Zuzzara had of rats. Ivy could not stand either rats or snakes, and so she killed them whenever she met any. Slicing off their little heads always made her feel better.
'Snakes, lizards, something else, my dear,' said Kid, still stirring through the skeletons on the floor. 'But these bones are men and halflings and dwarves.'
'Treasure hunters,' explained Sanval. 'The ruins were rumored to be laden with ancient treasures, magical artifacts, and so on. Men came, and dwarves too, and others as well, to dig through the buried cities. Tsurlagol has been many cities-each one destroyed in a siege and then rebuilt.'
'And wherever the treasure hunters go, predators follow close behind,' grumbled Mumchance.
Sanval nodded. 'The ruins gained an evil reputation, and most of the entrances were sealed. Then Tsurlagol fell in another battle, and another.'
'Until they lost track of their own ruins,' Mumchance said.
'Sort of place that my mother would have loved, if it were stacked with treasure,' observed Ivy. 'She probably could have sung you the city's entire history right back to when the first stone was laid for the first wall. When she wasn't saving the world or singing for some king, she was the most avid treasure hunter, always going underground after some artifact or other. That was one of the things that my father could never understand. He thought all jewels and gems were just worthless sparkly rocks compared to a nice flowering bush or a flourishing oak tree.'
As they talked, they all circled slowly around the enormous hall, careful to stay within the small circle of light cast by Mumchance's lantern. Kid ventured the farthest into the dark, reaching into the shadows to feel the walls and better assess their condition.
'Your parents sound…' Sanval hesitated. He obviously could not find a polite way to inquire about her ancestry, but he tried. 'They don't seem to have been quite the same as you.'
'Not hardly,' said Ivy with a snort. 'They were heroes. When your Thultyrl finishes his great library, you can find their exploits in a dozen story scrolls. Saved the world from incredible evil a dozen times.' She always found her parents hard to explain, especially to romantic fools like Sanval who believed in honor, great deeds, and noble acts of sacrifice as much as keeping their boots shined and their armor polished. Nor would he understand that the legacy of their heroics could be a greater burden than a boon to their daughter.
Mumchance pulled Wiggles out of his pocket and dropped the dog upon the floor, letting her run loose as he continued to examine the carvings at the bases of the pillars. She pawed at one pile of ash, turning up one of the scorched skulls that Kid had mentioned. Mumchance bent down to look closer at the dog's treasure. Several teeth had been broken out of the jaw. He shooed the dog away from the bones. He never allowed any of his dogs to chew on anything that resembled people, whether it was human, dwarf, or even orc. It made for bad feelings in a mercenary camp and, he believed, was bad for the dogs' teeth.
'Something came down here and pried the gold teeth out of the jaws,' he speculated as he held the skull out of Wiggles's whining reach. 'This area has been pretty well looted. There's no treasure left down here. Just ash and bones.'
Kid made a little grunt in agreement as he brushed away the ash covering a headless and armless skeleton. Unlike the other bones scattered nearby, this skeleton glowed an odd phosphorescent green.
'Blast,' said Ivy, catching sight of the shimmering green light surrounding the bones. 'Kid, I told you to leave that stuff alone.'
The odd skeleton moved, a very slow tentative movement, wiggling through the ash like a worm. Kid skipped neatly out of its way, not particularly frightened but not fool enough to let the skeleton touch him.
'What is it?' asked an amazed Sanval. In Procampur, bones did not go crawling around on their own.
'Skeleton warrior or what is left of one.' Gunderal sniffed. 'Badly made too. It should have a head, hands, and weapons.' The thing staggered upright and wobbled on unsteady feet toward them. The Siegebreakers circled out of its way. It tottered after Kid, as if it were playing some grotesque child's game of hide-and-tag.
Wiggles spotted the moving skeleton and with a joyous bark started chasing after it. The little white dog wove in and around the skeleton's ankles with little yips, obviously regarding the whole thing as one giant snack. She rose up on her hind legs, dancing like a beggar before the green glowing bones.
