with two great slabs of wood. The red-haired scholar must have noticed Toede's approach, for he snapped his book shut quickly as Toede drew near.
'What?' said Bunniswot, in his high nasal tone. It was a short, dismissive, 'go away' what.
'Just watching you work,' said Toede innocently.
'Don't,' snapped Bunniswot, ending the conversation. However, Toede did not budge and neither did the scholar reopen his notebook. Silence reigned in their part of the universe.
'What?' repeated Bunniswot.
'I was just wondering what you were looking for out here,' said Toede. 'I mean, is it treasure, or magic, or something else entirely?'
'I really don't see that it's any of your business,' said the scholar. 'Good-bye.'
'Hmmm,' said Toede, wandering up to the tilted plinth and cocking his head. 'Interesting. Very interesting.'
'You can read Proto-Ogre 1?' said Bunniswot, and Toede noted that his voice cracked.
'Hmmm?' said Toede, cocking an eye sideways at the scholar. 'No, no, I was just noting that the carving sequence is similar to the song cadences among my own people. Dah-dah-dee, dah-dah-dee.' He pointed at a collection of glyphs. 'Is this a song?'
'Not a song,' said Bunniswot quickly. 'A… memorial. A memorial to a fallen ur-ogre hero. Look, what do you want?' Not waiting for Toede to reply, he added, 'If I tell you what we're here for, will you go away and let me finish?'
Toede nodded. The red-haired scholar summarized, moving his hands rapidly as he did. 'Before there were ogres, back in the time of legend, there had to be something that would become ogres, correct? Now, old legends speak of a tall, beautiful, noble race. Enlightened, wealthy, powerful in magic, and artistic in expression. Suddenly this race disappears from the legends, with only a few scattered references to a great fall. Just as suddenly, the ogres appear and start doing ogrish things. What does
this suggest to you?'
'That the ogres killed all your beautiful artists and took their lands,' said Toede. 'If I go to sleep with a bird in my room and wake up with a cat there, I don't assume that one became the other.'
Bunniswot gave Toede a pained, withering look, and not for the first time in this discussion the hobgoblin wished he had not left his morning star behind in the tent. 'It means'-Bunniswot stressed the second word-'that the ur-ogres became the ogres that we know about today. And I believe we can learn from their example.'
'We can learn how to become ogres?' suggested Toede.
Bunniswot ignored him. 'Their culture, their arts, the high level of their existence that exceeded that of the elves. And these are all that's left of their fabled civilization.' He gestured toward the plinths.
When Toede made no further crass remarks, Bunniswot continued, softening his tone a little. 'This is the closest possible location of a surviving ur-ogre encampment. It took five months of scouting to find it. Renders handled most of that. He's the chief scholar, and the one who dealt with that toad-monster in Flotsam.'
Toede opened his mouth to say something, but realized that the scholar was speaking of Hopsloth. 'And have you learned to read this?'
Bunniswot's voice tightened slightly. 'Parts of it,' he said at last. 'A lot of the grammar and sentence-parsing is lost to me. But I may yet succeed, and if I do, my reputation will be made. Even the Towers of High Sorcery will sponsor me. Then I will be able to find the great lost ogre cities, and teach others about what I found, and publish a work of lasting value…'
Toede was spared Bunniswot's continued dreams of scholarly achievement by a shout from Groag, who had already saddled up the small, shaggy horses and was ready to ride.
The hobgoblin excused himself and backed away from the scholar. As soon as Toede was a sufficient distance away, Bunniswot's wood-clad notebook sprang open again, and the scholar went back to examining and writing, as if Toede had never interrupted him.
One thing is certain, thought Toede as he walked back to Groag, there is more here than meets the eye- human, ogre, or otherwise. Toede could smell the sweaty fear on the human when Bunniswot suspected, briefly, that Toede could decipher the glyphs.
It was two days' ride back to Flotsam, and Toede figured that gave him two days to convince Groag to head somewhere else, with the money and horses. One day, actually, since if Groag could not be convinced, Toede would sneak off in the dead of night without him. If Flotsam was under the control of Hopsloth, it was among the last places he wanted to go without a small army. Living nobly is one thing, but dying nobly is quite another.
The path was wide enough for the pair to ride two-abreast on their short, sturdy horses. For most of the afternoon they rode in silence. The shadows grew long as they rode in the shade of the western hills. Toede felt the farther the distance from the camp, the likelier that Groag would throw in with him. It wasn't as though they were kender slaves, after all.
It was Groag who broke the silence. 'I suppose I should thank you.' Toede scowled, thinking of Charka. 'Thank me?'
'You kept the draconian from killing me,' said Groag. 'I heard that. You called to it.'
'A moment of weakness,' said Toede, speaking the truth as far as it went.
'And you died in combat with it, in a burning pyre,' sighed the smaller hobgoblin. 'Sacrificed yourself so I might live.'
'Ah,' said Toede, playing with the idea of letting Groag think of him more heroically, but reluctantly abandoning it. It seemed more noble to be honest, particularly if it would help him scare Groag into going along with him. 'To be truthful, I didn't die fighting Gildentongue.'
'Then you've been alive all this-' Groag started, but Toede interrupted.
'I died,' said he, 'but not from Gildentongue. I was… digested, for lack of a better word.' Groag looked at him blankly. 'Hopsloth ate me,' Toede added flatly.
'Oh, my,' said Groag, his voice a mixture of concern and amusement.
'It seems,' continued Toede levelly, 'that the assassin we fought at the Jetties had been sent by Hopsloth, not Gildentongue. My mount was… less than pleased with the idea of my glorious return, and when the devoted gate guards reported that someone claiming to be me had reappeared in the city, he took what he thought was appropriate action.'
'Dumber than a bag of lampreys, you said?' chided Groag.
'You learn new things each and every day,' responded Toede.
'That might explain what happened later,' said Groag. Toede shot him a questioning look, and Groag continued. 'After my recovery, I told my story to the scholars, or what I thought had happened. About your return from the dead, and our misadventures, and what we discovered in your manor. But I didn't know that Hopsloth had… ah… eaten you.' Again the mix of bemusement and interest. 'I thought you died in combat with the aurak.
'Anyway,' Groag said, 'with Hopsloth in charge, there have been more disappearances. Like with Gildentongue, but more important people. The priests serving Hopsloth would denounce one person or another, and a few days later, they'd be gone.'
'That sounds stupid enough to be Hopsloth's doing,'
agreed Toede. 'He might as well hang a sign out in front of the city saying: Tyrant begging to be iced by adventurers- Heroes of the Lance preferred.'
By now the darkness was almost complete, and while the hobgoblins were not totally inconvenienced by the gathering gloom, the horses were becoming less sure in their steps. The pair stopped beneath a particularly large oak with a modicum of clear terrain at its base. Neither one sought to make a fire, since that was a human custom, and they had slept in worse conditions without benefit of bedrolls.
As the pair bedded down, Toede said, 'Groag, do you think we're doing the right thing? Going back to Flotsam, I mean. It doesn't sound particularly healthy.'
Groag was already bunched up in a small coil. 'As right as anything. I mean, if you don't go in announcing who you are, we can likely get in and out without any problem.'
'We could just take the horses and the pouch of coins and head west,' said Toede, as if the idea had just occurred to him. 'Have you ever been in the Solace area? Nice land, and the humans are easy to control.'
