“This barrow isn't shaped like any of the others," Mari noticed. "All of the Calimshite barrows are almost perfectly round. Whoever built this mound seems to have just tossed the dirt on haphazardly, probably just enough to cover whoever fell here. I can't imagine it holds anyone who was very important."
Let's find out," Caledan said, taking the spade and sinking it deep into the soft turf covering the barrow.
He had dug down barely a foot when the spade ground against something hard. He knelt down and brushed away the dirt from the hole. He pulled out the object that had caught the spade. It was a bone, yellowed and cracked with age, gnarled and knotty-looking.
"What sort of bone is this?" Caledan asked.
"Let me see," Ferret said, taking the bone from Caledan's grip. He turned it over in his hands, studying it carefully with his beady eyes. "It's a thighbone," he said after a moment. "But it's not human." The others stared at him in amazement.
"How do you know that?" Man asked him.
"Isn't it obvious?" Ferret rasped. "Whoever this bone belonged to, he wasn't all that good at walking upright. See these small bumps here? They'd be much bigger on a human, or a halfling for that matter. And look at the shape of the knee joint. It's all wrong. No, whoever this was, he had dreadful posture. I imagine his arms dragged the ground when he walked."
"Like a goblin?" Caledan asked, and the thief nodded.
"That's a good bet. Goblins have never been very good at standing up straight. What's more, this bone has knife marks all over it"
"You mean from a battle?" Man asked.
The thief shook his head. "No, more like from a butchering. I'd say that, after he died, our friend here was the guest of honor at a big feast-and the main course as well."
Mari gagged in revulsion.
"Goblins!" Tyveris spat like a curse.
"Ferret, how did you come to have so much knowledge concerning anatomy?" Morhion asked. If Mari hadn't known better, she would have thought she saw a flicker of amusement dancing in the mage's eyes.
"A good thief needs to know how the human body is built, Morhion," Ferret explained cheerfully. "How else would you know just where to slip the dagger in when you need to kill someone quickly and silently?" The companions regarded the thief with vaguely disgusted expressions, all except for Morhion.
"Interesting," the mage mused. "Very interesting."
Caledan's spade turned up more gnarled, knobby bones and flakes of rusted metal that might have belonged to weapons of some sort. It was clear from the number of bones that there were at least a dozen individuals buried in the mound.
Finally Caledan unearthed a low-browed skull with two nubby horns and a protruding snout. Its thick jawbone was lined with sharp, yellowed teeth.
"That's a goblin, all right," Caledan said. He had seen enough of the foul, twisted creatures in his lifetime to recognize that, given a little hairy, warty flesh, this skull would suit a goblin quite well.
"You don't suppose these are some of the goblins that killed Talek Talembar?" Estah asked.
"It's possible," Caledan mused. "But even if they were, I'm at a loss for how that could help us."
"Give me the skull," Morhion said. Caledan looked at the mage questioningly, but handed over the goblin skull.
"What are you going to do with it?" Mari asked.
"I'm going to speak with it," Morhion replied.
"No offense, Morhion," Ferret said, "but I've found that you tend to have more luck interrogating subjects when they're a little, er, fresher than this. I think you're a few centuries too late with this fellow."
"We shall see," the mage replied. He set the skull on a flat stone along with several items he drew from the small, mysterious pouch he always kept hidden in a fold of his robe: a bit of silver thread, a small chunk of yellow sulfur, and six pomegranate seeds. He held his hand over the skull and spoke several guttural words in the tongue of magic. The items the mage had set on the rock flared brightly with a deep purple light, then suddenly they dimmed and vanished. Mari gasped in shock, but before she could say anything a rough voice interrupted her.
It was the skull.
"Leave me alone, you bloody mage!" it said in an eerie voice.
The companions stared at the goblin skull in astonishment. It had not moved when it spoke, but Mari had no doubt that the voice had issued from the weathered skull. It was the dead goblin speaking.
"You must first answer my questions," Morhion said firmly.
"Garn, but I won't do it," the skull snarled. "Now go away, nasty wizard."
"I shall scatter your bones to the four winds," the mage said in a voice that sent chills up Man's back. "I shall let the buzzards peck at them, and you shall feel every moment of their desecration as an eternal agony."
"Oh, I'm scared, I am now," the skull said sarcastically. "You think I 'aven't already been desecrated? My mates made chow of me; it can't get any bloody worse than that."
"He has a point there," Caledan murmured to the others.
"Now put me back in the ground," the goblin skull whined.
"The wall that leads into the nether world of the dead is no barrier to my magic," Morhion said darkly. "I can cause such agony to your soul as you never dreamed of in life."
"You wouldn't dare!" the skull shrieked.
"Do goblins even have souls?" Mari whispered to Tyveris.
"I'm not sure," the loremaster whispered back. "It's an interesting theological question. If they do have souls, they've got to be awfully wretched, warty ones."
"Try me," Morhion said to the dead goblin, his eyes glittering.
"All right, all right, I'll talk," the skull whimpered. "But you got to promise you'll put me back in the ground."
"It will be done," the mage said. "Now tell me this: how did you come to be here?"
"I told you, my mates gnawed on my bones."
"Before that," Morhion said angrily.
"Oh," the skull said. It paused a moment, apparently thinking. "It all started when that shadowy man killed my tribe's chief. Now, no one 'as a right to do that. It's every tribe's privilege to murder its own chief. Why, what sort o' tribe is it, if you can't slit your leader's throat when you get tired of listening to 'im?"
"Stick to the story," Morhion warned.
"All right, don't get touchy," the goblin skull said in a hurt tone. "This shadowy man, he came from some place far off, but that weren't no excuse for sticking a sword in our chief. Me and some of the boys snuck up on 'im and put an arrow in 'im right neat. Taught 'im a lesson, we did. But when we got back to tell the rest o' the tribe what we done, we got a nasty surprise. Оl' Glok, he thought he should be chief now, but he knew we would just as soon tear 'is guts out. So's Glok laid an ambush for us. We beat him, only all that got kilt were et at the victory feast."
"Like you?" Morhion asked.
"Don't remind me!" the skull exclaimed.
"One more question."
"This 'ad better be it."
"What did you do with this 'shadowy man' after you put the arrow in him?"
"We shoved shadowy man in a hole, you know, to let 'im age a while before we et 'im. 'Twas in the west end of the valley. There's a ravine there, good for ambushin' travelers and slittin' their throats. We stuffed shadowy man in a cave up top o' the cliff. But Glok saw to it we never got to go back for 'im. I suppose he's still there, though I don't know what good he'd do you. I bet 'is bones ain't much good for gnawin' on by now."