"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 crack a little.
"So, is this a real event or not?" asked Zuzzara, who never could stand much philosophizing and disliked talk about elves because of some bad experiences with one of her stepmothers.
"Well, it's not an elf-made picture, which makes it a bit tricky to tell," started Mumchance.
"Somebody came down here in the dust and gloom, not to mention risking kobolds and whatever chewed that bugbear, and stopped to look at it," said Ivy.
"Maybe we should discover who that person was," suggested Sanval.
"Or maybe we should look for a way out that keeps us out of their path," Ivy said loudly.
Nobody was listening to her. They were all carefully puzzling over the picture on the floor. There were times when kobolds were more sensible than her friends. At least kobolds concentrated on the basics like finding food and left mystical patterns written in the floor tiles alone.
"I don't think that they were just looking at the pictures. I think they stopped to read the runes," added Gunderal. "Look how the dust is cleaned away so carefully."
"Can you read them?" asked Ivy, because it was obvious that nobody was going to do anything until they had solved this little mystery.
Gunderal shook her head. "Too old. Four hundred years or more, if I had to guess. And it's only a guess." She looked at Mumchance where he was bent over the runes, tracing the edges of each shape with a stubby finger.
"I'm old," snorted the dwarf. "But I'm not that old. Runes change, meanings change. But these… These might be corruptions of old Netherese symbols."
"That is not possible," said Sanval.
"Even I know that empire was dust long before the first Tsurlagol was built," added Ivy, just to stay in the conversation.
"The empire disappeared long before Tsurlagol was built," agreed Mumchance. "But that doesn't mean all their magic disappeared overnight. Dig deep enough and you run into strange things in the Vast-artifacts, toys, bits of spellbooks that those mad sorcerers left behind. They were human, after all-that meant they bred like rabbits and ran like deer when the disaster finally overtook them."
"Mumchance," said Ivy in gentle reproof. "Both Sanval and I would like to think our race has a few redeeming qualities."