toe.
'Nice rope,' said Zuzzara, unwinding the coil of rope from the bugbear's shoulder.
'The weapons are trash,' replied Mumchance with a dwarf's contempt for shoddy metalwork. 'Worse than ours. The sword is blunt, and the knife has a notched blade. The scabbard's not bad-it's better work than the rest, gilt on leather and some nice stitching.'
'Loot then, picked up here and there,' said Ivy, knowing the signs. 'Making do with what the others don't want. Fancy scabbard kept after someone else has taken the good blade.'
'Fottergrim's raiders were so armored,' said Sanval. 'Carrion crows, picking what they can out of other's misery.' Ivy wondered if he was still describing Fottergrim's troops or delivering a bit of a rebuke. She decided to take his comments as referring to the former.
'There might be more of Fottergrim's people in the ruins,' he added.
'Must be more,' answered Ivy. 'A bugbear like this wouldn't come down on its own.'
'Maybe they were countermining us,' said Mumchance.
'Countermining?' asked Sanval.
'Digging under where they think we are digging,' Ivy explained, 'to collapse our tunnel. Except we did such a very good job of collapsing it ourselves and saved them the trouble. Mumchance, they are pretty far off the line if they were looking for our tunnel. And the bugbear doesn't have any shovel or pick.'
'Maybe the others took the tools with them,' suggested the dwarf.
'And left the weapons and the torches?'
'No, my dears, they did not stop to take anything. When this one was killed, the others kept their distance,' said Kid, who was circling back and forth, peering at the tracks on the tiled floor. 'They started forward, stamp, stamp, stamp, not running, just walking, but then they stopped very quick, shuffle, shuffle back and to the side. Two of the big ones tried to turn back again, but the other one, the one with man-sized feet, drove them away.'
Silence fell on the group, as they realized what Kid meant.
'They moved out of range and let whatever it was chew on the poor bastard. Or their officer ordered them not to attempt a rescue,' said Zuzzara, voicing all their thoughts. 'Remind me not to fight for Fottergrim's pay, if that's the way that they treat their mercenaries.'
'A wise decision,' said Sanval with that little quirk of the lips that indicated he was amused.
'Especially since we're fighting for Procampur,' emphasized Ivy with a quick kick at Zuzzara's ankles. She missed her target; Zuzzara could move fast when she chose.
'Why are they here then, Ivy?' said Gunderal to cover up her sister's mistake and Ivy's embarrassment.
'A little quick treasure hunting?' guessed Mumchance.
'In the middle of a siege?' said Ivy. 'Well, it can be boring sitting on the walls waiting for someone to attack.'
'Because of this,' said Mumchance, who had moved from the bugbear's looted corpse. Before him gaped a black square. He swung the lantern forward to reveal an ancient city bath, with marvelous mosaic pictures covering the bottom of what was once a large pool.
With the use of Mumchance's lantern, they could make out footprints trailing through the dry and dust-filled bath. Kid jumped in the pool and began tracking the tracks, his nose almost brushing the floor.
'Here a big two-foot knelt,' sang out Kid. 'Here his four companions waited, jog, jog, jog from one foot to the other. They were impatient. Scared too, most certainly frightened. They kept turning to peer behind them. Why, my dears, why?'
'They heard a noise, or thought they heard one,' speculated Ivy. 'They were expecting an attack. Then they came out of there and were attacked.'
'Five at the bottom of the pool?' asked Sanval.
'Oh, five, definitely five,' said Kid. 'Five walked down here, and five went out. But only four ran away from this room.'
'Leaving one dead companion behind them,' said Ivy. 'They were right to be nervous. Something was hunting around here.'
'Then why wait for someone to look at pictures in the bottom of a dried out pool?' asked Gunderal.
'There are armor scrapes against these tiles. From where the one with man-sized feet knelt,' said Kid, peering even closer. 'Here's a line a little ways back. Sword, scabbard maybe, brushed the dust behind him?'
'Officer then. They had to wait for him,' said Ivy, sitting down cross-legged on the edge of the bath. When Kid went tracking, he could grow a bit obsessed. From past experience, she had learned to make herself comfortable until he was done. Sanval remained standing, straight as always, shifting slightly from one foot to the other. Ivy reached up with her fist curled and rapped his armored knee. 'Rest now and stand at attention later,' she said.
Sanval nodded and knelt on one knee beside her to watch Kid. Well, sometimes the man displayed sense, thought Ivy.
'Look at the picture, Ivy, that's a wizard in the center of that picture,' said Gunderal. 'Zuzzara, can you bring the light closer?'
Zuzzara nodded and jumped down into the bath. She swung her lit torch over the pattern that Gunderal had pointed out.
The dust had been carefully swept away from the center of the bath, displaying a series of mosaic pictures. The first picture showed a wizard, with runes woven in his azure cloak, standing before a tall tower with flames sprouting from it. More flames played along the walls behind the tower, and behind the walls a hint of rooftops, also engulfed in flames. Men and women ran along the tops of the walls, arms outstretched as if pleading with the wizard to save them. A great jewel, portrayed in tiny crystal tiles, glittered in the wizard's hand.
A trail of more runes, picked out in silver and gold tiles, circled away from the picture and led to a second one. The burning tower was leaning forward, and men fell from its crenellated top to lie on the ground before the wizard. Black lines zigzagged away from the wizard's feet and led to a final picture, which showed men carrying the supine wizard away on a bier, the gleaming gem resting on the center of his chest and portrayed as twice the size of any man's head.
'And down go the walls of Tsurlagol,' said Ivy, waving a hand at the center picture. 'Which siege do you suppose that was?'
'Long ago,' guessed Gunderal. 'Look at the runes on his cloak.'
'Two or three generations before they built this bath, and the tile work is old to begin with,' guessed Mumchance. The dwarf dropped over the rim of the bath and stalked toward the picture to examine it more closely.
'What do you mean? Why two or three?' asked Sanval.
'Takes that long for humans to turn something horrible into art,' said Mumchance with all the authority of a dwarf who had already celebrated his three hundredth birthday. 'Mighty big shock for the folk like me-leave a town with all the humans swearing that they will never forget this or that, come back in ninety years, and it's all a fairy tale to those humans' grandchildren. Or a decoration for their city bath. Why if half the heroes in the world were as tall as their statues…'
'They'd all be giants,' chorused Zuzzara and Gunderal. This was an old, old complaint of Mumchance, and they'd heard it almost as often as his tale of having to earn his first mining tools by shoveling away snow higher than his ears from the mountain entrances of his family's diggings.
'And dwarves don't do that?' asked Sanval, and Zuzzara and Gunderal groaned.
'You shouldn't encourage him,' translated Ivy when Sanval glanced at the sisters. 'Let's hope this is one of his shorter lectures.'
'It takes dwarves longer to lie to themselves,' admitted Mumchance, ignoring Ivy's comment. 'And we don't do pretty just for pretty's sake. Well, not in pictures. Armor and jewelry-that's metalwork and another story. Elves, now, they have the longest memories. When they make a picture like this, it's to remind other folk, and they hate it when you question what's real and what's not. Everything is real to an elf.'
'Some of them just have a finer sense of humor about it than others,' added Ivy, who got along better with elves than the rest of the Siegebreakers. She appreciated their efforts to seek out her father in Ardeep when he disappeared during his last journey into the forest. It wasn't the elves' fault that he had not wanted to be found after her mother's death. Ivy suspected that he was probably one of the murmuring oaks shading the path there. He had always talked about the simplicity of life as a tree-trees, after all, did not have hearts that could break, or even
