Song of the Saurials

7 Beneath Finder’s Keep

Finder cursed under his breath as he and Olive turned a corner of the underground tunnels and were forced to another halt. Olive sighed with resignation. Their way was blocked by a wall of rocks, dirt, and mud where the ceiling had caved into the passage. It was the fourth such obstacle they’d encountered. The first had been at the base of the stairs that led from the ruined manor house to the underground tunnels. It had taken them an hour to clear a hole through it. The second collapse hadn’t been as severe, and within half an hour they’d wriggled their way through. When they came upon the third collapse, Finder had decided to backtrack to the stairs and try a different route through the maze of twisting tunnels. Now they had no choice but to start digging again.

“If I hadn’t lost the stone, we could have taken a dimensional door into the workshop,” Finder growled, kicking at the base of the pile of rubble.

Trying to keep Finder from dwelling on the loss of his stone, Olive remarked, “Unless the roof in the workshop collapsed, too. Then we’d be transported beneath a pile of rubble and dead.”

“No,” Finder replied, shoving his torch into the base of the rubble. “Then the dimension door would leave us in the astral plane. The workshop will be fine, though,” he said. “Nothing could have gotten in there.”

“Half a ton of rock doesn’t need a key,” Olive pointed out, setting her own torch beside Finder’s.

“True,” Finder said, “but these ceilings haven’t collapsed from anything natural.” He pointed to a portion of the arched ceiling that was still intact. It was lined with quarried stone, perfectly fitted. “We haven’t found any of the quarried stone in the piles,” he said.

“It would probably be at the bottom of the pile,” Olive replied. “We haven’t dug that deep.”

Finder shook his head. “Some of it would be on the edges. It’s impossible for an arch to collapse unless some of the stone is removed.” The bard pointed to the top of the collapsed portion. “It wasn’t pried or chipped out, and it didn’t fracture in a straight line. See how circular the collapsed parts are—making an arc right through the stones?”

“Yes” Olive said hesitantly, feeling a little nervous.

“It’s been disintegrated,” Finder explained.

“Oh, great!” the halfling muttered.

“Recently, too, I’d say, judging from the lack of water damage,” the bard added. “Probably by the same person or creature who dispelled the continual light enchantments that used to be on the archway keystones.”

“Marvelous,” Olive replied sarcastically. “And we’re digging our way right toward whoever did it. Did it ever occur to you that this person or creature might have blocked the passages because he, she, or it wanted to be left alone?”

“I don’t care,” Finder snapped. “If it’s there, it’s in my home, and I’m going to get rid of.”

“Right,” Olive said without enthusiasm. “Suppose you get disintegrated first?”

“There’s enough magic in my workshop to demolish an army. I created the finder’s stone there,” he said. He began pulling small boulders out of the rubble.

Olive scrabbled up the pile and began digging out dirt and mud with her tiny pack shovel. Finder had broken the handle using it as a wedge on a boulder in the first pile of rubble they’d dug through, so now only Olive could use it comfortably. “You mean,” she corrected the bard, “that that’s where you altered the stone’s already magical nature with a piece of enchanted para-elemental ice.”

Finder looked up at the halfling with a hint of surprise. “And where did you learn that?” he asked.

“Elminster was explaining it to the Harper tribunal when I … uh, passed through,” Olive said.

“He was, was he? Well, that stone was one of the most brilliant ideas of the century,” Finder said, tossing more rocks into the passageway behind them. “Para-elemental ice is far colder than ordinary ice,” he explained as they worked. “It keeps the finder’s stone from overheating no matter how much lore or how many songs or spells are stored inside it. The cold also helps the stone retrieve any information I’ve put into it as fast as a human mind could.”

Olive recalled that Finder had once compared his own memory and voice to polished ice. “Did you use another piece of this magical ice in Alias?” she asked.

“Yes,” Finder replied. “The most talented wizards of the era told me it couldn’t be done, that it wouldn’t work, but they were all wrong. Alias lives, and she will never forget anything I taught her. She’s even better than the Finder’s stone, since she can learn new things without my help. She amazes even Elminster,” the bard boasted.

“I think Elminster likes her more than he’s amazed by her,” Olive said.

“Don’t let the sage’s grandfatherly act fool you. Alias is the most remarkable piece of craftsmanship Elminster has ever seen, and he knows it. She’s a constant reminder that I was right and he was wrong. He’ll always regret that he turned me down when I asked for his help trying to create the first singer.”

Olive strongly doubted that Elminster felt any such thing. She was beginning to feel less tolerant of Finder and his vanity. She was hungry and tired and dirty and, quite frankly, afraid of whatever it was that had disintegrated the ceiling. Finder had failed to recognize the danger Kyre presented, and Grypht had paid the price. The halfling had no desire to become a casualty of the bard’s scheme to recover his home. It was time, she decided, to prick his ego, to bring him back to reality and get him to reconsider heading back to civilization.

“So,” Olive said, “what went wrong with the first singer?” she asked casually.

“I was careless,” Finder replied, rocking a large stone loose from the pile. “I inserted the enchanted ice too quickly, and it exploded.”

“That’s what you told Elminster. But what really happened?” Olive asked.

“Why would I lie to Elminster?” Finder asked, without denying that there was more to the story.

Olive grinned. “I’ll know that when you tell me what happened,” she replied.

“What do you know about it, Olive girl?” the bard asked with a light tone, but the halfling could tell she’d made him nervous.

“I know that Flattery came to life,” Olive said, “but even though he looked just like you, he didn’t turn out to be as dutiful a child as Alias. He didn’t want to go into the family music business. He took up magic instead.”

Finder stopped working and stepped away from the blockade, looking up at Olive with astonishment, perhaps even fear. “How did you know that?” he gasped.

Olive sat down on a boulder. She laid down her shovel, pulled off her gloves, and ran her fingers through her hair, trying to brush out the dirt. “It’s nothing special. I just happened to run into him—Flattery, that is.”

Finder rolled his eyes to the ceiling, muttering, “Halfling luck!” He made it sound like a curse.

Olive laughed. “You don’t believe in that silly superstition, do you?”

Finder leaned back against the passage wall. “Of course I do. You’re living proof. Why do you think Cassana and Phalse tried so hard to get you to turn against Alias?”

Olive’s eyes narrowed. It was embarrassing just remembering how close she had come to betraying Alias, Akabar, and Dragonbait. “Because they were vicious sadists,” she snapped, “who wanted to see just how frightened they could make me.”

“The truth is, they were afraid of you. You and all your race never follow the score. You’re always improvising without the composer’s consent. You destroyed all their plans with one decision and your halfling luck. I’m beginning to know how they must have felt,” Finder said with an embarrassed grin. “And just what do you mean, you ‘just happened’ to run into Flattery?” he asked curiously.

Finder’s sudden interest in her luck made Olive nervous. It was bad luck to talk about luck. “You tell me first. What went wrong when you created Flattery?” Olive asked.

Finder shrugged. “He didn’t want to sing. We argued about it, and he got angry. I had two apprentices with me at the time, Kirkson and Maryje. Flattery killed Kirkson and injured Maryje. Then he ran off. By the time I’d gotten help for Maryje, the trail was cold. Then the Harpers brought me to trial and exiled me. I tried scrying for Flattery all these years, but he kept himself hidden with his magic.”

“Did you name him Flattery?”

Finder’s face turned stormy. “That was Kirkson’s fault,” he said. “A practical joke to tease me. Once he told the creature that was its name, it wouldn’t accept a different one.”

“What were you going to name it?”

“I hadn’t decided yet.”

“Hadn’t decided or hadn’t even considered giving it a name?” Olive guessed.

Finder looked contrite. “I remembered to give Alias one,” he said defensively.

“Alias. Some name,” Olive replied. “I still can’t figure out why you lied to Elminster.”

“I was afraid the Harpers might hunt down the crea—Flattery. I hoped if he was free, he might relent and sing my songs after all.”

“Not a chance,” Olive said. “Flattery hated your guts. He wanted to destroy you and wipe out the whole rest of the Wyvernspur clan, too.”

Finder turned away from the halfling. In the torchlight, Olive couldn’t tell what emotion he was concealing. With his back to her, the bard asked, “So how did you meet him?”

“I was in Immersea,” Olive explained. “You know the wyvern’s spur—your family heirloom that turns the bearer into a wyvern and protects him from magic and—”

Finder spun around and interrupted her. “I know all about the spur,” he said with annoyance. “I watched my idiot brother use it often enough. Get to the point, please.”

“Well, Flattery didn’t know all about it. Fourteen years ago, one member of your family, Cole Wyvernspur, Giogi Wyvernspur’s father, discovered that Flattery was slaughtering people. Cole figured out that Flattery was a member of the family and challenged him to a duel to keep the family honor intact, so to speak. Flattery killed Cole, but Cole, using the spur, nearly killed Flattery. So Flattery tried to steal the spur, thinking he could use it against you and the rest of the clan. Giogi stopped him, though.”

“Giogi? Giogi Wyvernspur? That ridiculous fop whom Alias nearly killed last year?” Finder asked.

“That’s the one. Grown some since then. Nice boy.”

“What happened to Flattery?” Finder demanded impatiently.

“Giogi had to kill him,” Olive said softly. “Even if Flattery couldn’t use the spur, he would have wiped out the Wyvernspur family. He was powerful enough and certainly crazy enough.”

Finder looked down at the tunnel floor and gave a resigned sigh. Olive thought he might be grieving, but when he looked back up, she saw a look of relief on his face.

“If it hadn’t been for Dragonbait, Alias would have been just as bad as Flattery,” Olive said. “Maybe worse.”

“No, she wouldn’t!” Finder answered vehemently. “I didn’t make the same mistake with her.”

“What mistake?”

Finder didn’t answer. Instead, he bent over and resumed pulling stones from the debris that obstructed the passageway.

Olive reached down and grabbed one of the bard’s fingers. “What mistake?” she repeated.

“Nothing,” Finder said. “You’re right. Dragonbait made all the difference.”

Olive couldn’t think of anything that could make Finder relinquish any credit for his success with Alias, but she was certain he was lying. However, she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know why. She did know that she didn’t want to see the workroom where Flattery had been created.

Olive released Finder’s finger and patted him gently on the wrist. “Finder, let’s leave. I told Giogi about you. He said you’re welcome in his home anytime. That’s where I was going to take you.”

The bard looked up and laughed. “Giogi? That’s who you expected to protect me from the Harpers? Ruskettle, have you taken leave of your senses?”

“Giogi has a friend called Cat who can keep you hidden. I thought you’d want to meet her.”

“Why?”

“She’s one of the copies that Phalse made of Alias,” Olive explained.

Finder reached up and grabbed Olive’s wrists. “What?” he shouted.

“You know—one of the twelve copies he made,” Olive explained. “I found another one—Jade. We were friends, but Flattery killed her. He thought she was Cat. He was mad at Cat because he thought she’d betrayed him. She was his apprentice for a while, since she’s a mage. Jade was a pickpocket—a good one, too. Anyway, Cat sided with Giogi against Flattery. He was horrible to her—Flattery, that is.”

Finder sat on the pile of rock he’d been shifting. “Olive, I think I’m getting too old to keep up with you. If you have any more revelations, give them to me now, while I’m sitting down.”

“Cat’s going to have Giogi’s baby next spring. So you’ll be a grandfather, sort of, besides being an eleventh-generation great-granduncle.”

Finder closed his eyes and began to rub his temples with his fingers.

“So how about heading for Immersea?” the halfling asked, hoping Finder would be more open to the suggestion in his shocked state.

Finder shook visibly and rose to his feet. “I need to get into my workshop first. Then we can discuss what to do next.”

“Suppose whatever’s set up housekeeping down here is between us and the workshop?” Olive protested.

“I’m not going to let some squatter keep me from my own home,” the bard answered angrily.

“Finder, you’ve been in exile for two hundred years. It’s not as if whatever it is didn’t wait a decent interval before moving in.”

The bard grinned slyly. “It’s getting awfully late to be on the road, Olive,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather have a bath and spend the night in a comfortable bed before we leave? I can get you that with the magic in my workshop.”

Olive tried to fend off the temptation by imagining a ray of disintegration coming toward her.

“The door to the workshop is only about another hundred feet down this passage,” Finder said.

Olive pictured the green ray of disintegration Flattery had used to destroy her friend Jade and did not reply.

“Then we wouldn’t have to walk at all.” Finder added. “I have copies of my spellbooks in my workshop. I can teleport us to Immersea.”

Olive sighed at her own weakness. She slipped on her gloves, picked up her shovel once again, and started shifting dirt. Finder began to sing a dwarven mining tune as he returned to digging out the rocks. In spite of her annoyance with the bard’s stubbornness and her fear of whatever lay beyond the obstructions, Olive hummed along in harmony. It was too hard to resist the power of Finder’s voice.

They were both growing tired, so they worked more slowly. They’d been at it nearly an hour when Olive felt a flutter of air waft through her hair. “Got it!” she whispered down to the bard.

“Do you see anything?” Finder asked.

The halfling put her face near the flow of air and squinted. “It’s too dark,” she reported. Her talent for seeing in the dark had never been as well developed as most of her folk, but her other senses were sharp enough. “It feels warmer,” she said, “and—phew! Your home’s new tenant isn’t much of a housekeeper. It smells like garbage.”

Finder started working faster, excited by the nearness of their goal.

Olive slipped down to the floor to give the bard room to work. He piled stones up on either side of the tunnel to shore up the ceiling as he dug into the dirt. Olive watched him wriggle like a snake into the hole he’d created and disappear. If he wanted to go first, she had no objections. If there was something waiting on the other side, Finder was a bigger target and made a good shield.

“I need the torch,” his muffled voice called out.

Olive took up Finder’s torch and scrambled up to the hole. She thrust it through as far her halfling arm could reach and leaned it against the stones the bard had positioned. Finder reached back carefully and pulled it the rest of the way through. Olive slipped her shovel into her knapsack and slid back down the rubble to fetch her own torch. “Damn!” Finder growled from the other side of the rubble.

“What is it?” Olive called out with alarm.

Finder did not reply.

Olive froze in horror. “Finder?” she whispered. From the other side of the rubble, she heard the sound of rattling iron. Olive snatched up her torch and scrabbled to the hole. “Finder!” she shouted.

“No need to shout, Olive girl,” Finder called back. “I can hear you.”

“Why did you say ‘damn’?” she asked angrily, thrusting her torch into the hole.

“Someone’s put an iron grate across the passage,” the bard explained. “Nothing I can’t handle, though.”

As Olive crawled through the hole toward the light, she heard the sound of a wire jiggling in a lock. As she poked her head out of the hole, she saw the iron grate ten feet away. There was a door with a simple-looking lock set in it. The bard was bent over it, picking at it with a bit of wire. Why, Olive wondered, would anyone seal the passages with cave-ins and then put up an iron grate with a door in it? That is, unless they had some insidious reason to want someone to open the door.… “Finder, wait!” the halfling cried urgently. “Let me have a look first!”

A distinct click echoed down the passageway. Finder pushed on the grate. It swung open on squeaky hinges. The bard turned around, grinning at Olive with amusement. “I told you I could handle it,” he said.

Olive rolled her eyes. “You can never have too many people check a lock,” she snapped. “Suppose it had been trapped?”

Finder shrugged. “It wasn’t. No harm done,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

Sometimes, Olive thought, he’s just like a little boy. She slid down the pile of dirt and stone on the other side and picked up her torch.

“After you, my dear,” Finder said, motioning for her to go through the doorway.

Olive eyed the passage cautiously. It was too dim to pick out any really well-hidden traps. “Age before beauty,” she replied.

A rueful look flickered across the bard’s face, but he turned and stepped across the threshold into the passage beyond.

Olive understood that look. Now that Finder was no longer living on the boundary of the plane of life, his body was feeling his great age more, and Finder had never liked anything that reminded him of his mortality. The younger halfling couldn’t bring herself to tease him about it. She remembered all too well her mother’s own groaning complaints when her body began to fail. No doubt, Olive realized, I’ll be just as annoyed when I get old—providing I live long enough, she amended, though she suspected the odds of that decreased the longer she stayed with Finder.

She trotted after the bard anyway. “So, where’s this workshop?” she asked when she caught up with him.

“Straight ahead, Olive,” Finder said, pointing down the dim corridor.

Olive held her torch higher and peered into the darkness. Two dim torchlights shone somewhere farther down the passage. “Someone’s coming,” she hissed, halting in her tracks.

Finder chuckled. He moved his torch up and down, and one of the lights ahead of them rose and fell as if in reply. “It’s just our reflection, Olive. The door is enchanted, made of polished steel. Keeps it from being disintegrated.”

Olive paced behind Finder. Halfway down the passage, a strand of her hair blew across her face. Olive halted again and turned sideways. From a gap in the wall large enough for a human to pass through, warm air, stinking of garbage, blew into the corridor. The quarried stone that had covered the gap lay smashed in pieces about the passageway floor, crunching under their feet. Beyond the gap was a tunnel stretching farther than the torchlight could reveal.

“This must be where whatever it was that disintegrated those arches broke in,” Olive said.

Finder turned and walked back to inspect the gap. “Yes,” he said slowly. “The hillside is riddled with natural caves and galleries. I had this gap sealed off to keep cave monsters out. I should have filled in the tunnel behind the gap, too. Well, it can’t be helped now,” he said with a shrug and continued down the corridor, intent on his goal.

Olive stared down the tunnel behind the gap, wondering what sort of creature, possessing the power to disintegrate things, would live with that smell. Something without a nose, she thought, an idea that did not comfort her any. For a brief moment, she thought she saw tiny points of red light, but they blinked out immediately. She stepped closer to the hole.

From down the corridor Finder had followed came the rattle of another iron grate. With a start, Olive realized they had fallen into a trap—one undoubtedly set by the unknown thing that had disintegrated the ceilings. Her heart pounding with fear, she raced down the corridor toward the bard. Ten feet from the steel door to his underground workshop, someone had set up a second iron grate with a door. Finder had wedged his torch in the grating and was already bent over the door’s lock with his wire pick.

“Must be something to keep the children out,” the bard muttered disdainfully, but Olive could see at a glance that the lock on this second door was far more complicated than that on the first.

“Finder,” she whispered nervously, tugging on his sleeve, “it’s a trap. Something’s coming from the caves back there. We have to get out of here. Now!”

“Don’t be silly, Olive,” the bard said. “I’ll only be a moment; then we can seal ourselves in the workshop. Ouch!” Finder drew his hand up to his mouth and sucked on his knuckle. “Scratched myself,” he said with a touch of embarrassment.

Olive’s eyes widened with horror. “Spit!” she ordered him.

“What?” the bard asked with amusement.

“Spit, you idiot! You’ve been jabbed by a poison needle! Don’t swallow!”

Finder’s brow wrinkled with concern. He turned his head and spat on the floor while Olive pulled out a flask and shoved it into his hands.

“Rinse your mouth and your hand,” she ordered, looking back down the corridor anxiously.

Finder took a swig from the flask and spat it out, gagging and coughing. “What is this?” he asked.

“Luiren Rivengut,” the halfling said. “Best whiskey there is.”

“Tymora! If the poison doesn’t get me, this stuff will!” Finder muttered.

“Wash out the scratch,” Olive ordered.

Finder splashed some of the whiskey on his knuckle.

“Let’s go,” Olive said.

“Olive, now that I’ve sprung the trap, we’ve nothing to lose,” Finder said, bending back over the lock with his pick. “It will be a snap to get this grate open and get into the workshop.”

“No, it won’t,” the halfling insisted, growing more frantic with each passing moment. “This is a tee-trap,” she explained. “The first lock had a silent alarm. This lock will be so complicated it will detain us long enough for guards to reach us from that tunnel back there. We’ll be trapped long before we can get the door open.”

“No, we won’t,” Finder insisted, jiggling his wire in the lock, but a moment later, he fumbled the wire and it bounced through the grate. He slid his arm through the grate in an unsuccessful attempt to reach it.

Something crunched on the broken stone in the passage behind them. Finder froze, his lockpick forgotten. Very slowly the bard pulled away from the grate, rose to his feet, and turned around.

In the passageway near the tunnel behind the gap in the wall stood three shadowy human-sized figures. Their beady red eyes reflected the light of the bard’s and the halfling’s torches.

With his left hand, Finder grabbed Olive’s wrist and thrust her behind him, while with his right, he drew a dagger from his boot.

One shadowy figure drew closer to the torchlight. It was a male creature with a jutting forehead, a snout, long canine teeth, pointed ears, and green skin covered with coarse hair.

Orcs, Olive thought with a disgusted shudder. Tymora, why couldn’t it have been something cleaner or nicer, like giant rabid rats?

The other two orcs stepped into the light just behind the first. Each wore a pair of trousers, a vest of dirty yellow cloth, a necklace decorated with dried human ears, and a belt with a holstered axe, and each held a loaded crossbow pointed at Finder’s middle. They carried no torches; they apparently could see well enough in the dark without them.

“S’render ’r die,” the first ore ordered in slurred, barely intelligible common.

“Such unappealing options,” Finder replied glibly. “I surrender. Here,” he said, offering his dagger, hilt first, to the orc, but Olive could tell from the way his left hand tightened about her wrist that he was tensed for a fight.

The orc squinted his eyes suspiciously, but he was too tempted by the sight of the emeralds and topazes set in the hilt of Finder’s dagger to order the bard to throw the weapon to the floor. Moving a step closer, the orc reached out to take the weapon from Finder.

More quickly than Olive would have thought possible, Finder’s right leg shot up from the floor, kicking the ore’s crossbow hand. The orc howled and fired his weapon, but the bolt discharged harmlessly toward the ceiling, then clattered to the floor. Finder charged between the other two orcs, pulling Olive with him. The halfling threw her torch into the face of one of the creatures as she passed it. Hurriedly the bard raced down the dark passage, dragging Olive behind him as though she were a rag doll.

Olive heard the orcs chasing after them, then the twang of another crossbow. The bolt thunked into something soft. From the grunt Finder made and the way he stumbled, the halfling guessed the bard had been hit, but he regained his balance and ran on. He smashed into the iron grate at the other end of the corridor. Something cackled beside them. It was a fourth orc, Olive realized, sent to relock the door leading to escape! The damned orcs weren’t as stupid as they looked. In the dark, she couldn’t see the creature, but she heard him breathing beside her.

Finder tugged on the iron grate door, but it held fast. A rough, hairy hand grabbed Olive’s left arm and began pulling her away from the bard. Olive shrieked. Finder tightened his grip on the halfling’s right wrist and tugged back. Olive felt like a wishbone at a feast. She sensed Finder slashing at the orc with his dagger, then something warm and sticky gushed over her head—orc blood. The orc released her arm and fell heavily.

“Get the lock!” Finder ordered, pushing Olive toward the door. He used his own body to shield her from the rest of the orcs, who had to be moving stealthily toward them.

Olive felt her way to the lock, slid a wire from her hair, and jiggled it in the iron mechanism. She couldn’t believe how easily she got the bolt to turn over. If she’d been the one to open it the first time, she would have realized much sooner that this was a trap. As she pulled open the grate, she heard more crossbows twanging in the darkness and the sound of another bolt burying itself in flesh.

Tugging at Finder’s sleeve, the halfling got the bard through the door, pushed it closed, and, within moments, relocked it with her wire. As she turned to hurry down the corridor, a hand slipped through the grate and grabbed her hair.

“Let go!” Olive shouted. She felt Finder near her, stabbing through the grate. She felt the hand go limp as it released her.

“Through the hole,” Finder shouted. “Go! Go! Go!”

Olive scrambled up the pile of dirt and stone in the dark, all the while concentrating on locating a trace of the cool air on the other side of the cave-in. “Finder! Here!” she called out when she felt a bit of cooler air blowing through the tunnel. The bard scrambled up the slope beside her and pushed her through the opening.

Olive crawled as fast as she could to clear the tunnel so Finder could get through. After a full minute, when he still didn’t emerge from the opening, Olive started back through to see what was keeping him. She found his body lying in the tunnel, motionless.

“Finder, you’ve got to get moving!” she shouted, shaking him by the shoulders. She grabbed his hand, thinking, quite unreasonably, that she might drag him through. His hand was warm, but it was puffed up to the size of an grapefruit.

It’s the poison from that damned needle trap, Olive thought. He didn’t get just a little scratch; he got stabbed good. “I should have realized he’d lie about it,” she muttered to herself as she rummaged through her knapsack, searching in the dark for the one potion that might help the bard. In the dark, she had to identify the correct vial by its shape. She pulled it out, then shook the bard some more. “Finder, you’ve got to drink this. Wake up!” she insisted.

The bard groaned softly.

That might be the most reaction I get out of him, the halfling thought. Quickly she turned his head sideways, unstoppered the potion, and poured it past his lips. “Swallow,” she ordered. To her great relief, he did.

After a few moments, Finder stirred, then croaked, “What?”

“Finder, come on!” Olive implored.

The bard shook himself and wriggled forward slowly. Olive backed away, tugging on his tunic encouragingly. Finally they both reached the other side and rolled down the pile of rubble.

Olive could hear the orcs arguing among themselves in some unintelligible tongue. Then the grate rattled loudly.

“I’ll light a torch,” Olive said. “It’ll just take a mo—”

“We don’t need one,” Finder muttered.

Olive felt the bard take her right hand in his left. With his poisoned right hand, he felt along the wall, leading her through the maze of passages. She could sense he was limping.

The next cave-in was easier to crawl through, but it took Finder several minutes to negotiate it. Olive put her hand on his back after he’d managed to pull himself through. His shirt and tunic were drenched with perspiration.

“Do you want to rest for a minute?” she asked.

“No,” the bard growled. “Keep going.”

By the time they reached the cave-in below the stairs, Finder’s breathing was strained and shallow, and his skin was cold and clammy. Olive wasn’t sure he’d make it up the slope of the tunnel they’d dug. When she finally crawled out into the shaft of sunlight pouring down the stairway, Olive was exhausted, but perhaps the knowledge that it was the last stretch gave the bard more strength. He clambered through the tunnel and, with a great beastlike roar, tore up the stairs, passing the startled halfling.

Olive muttered as she was forced to use her hands to help her scrabble up the steep steps. Once she’d reached the top, she slammed the stairway door closed and threw the dead bolt. Her companion had a key to lock it as well, but he was in no condition to use it.

Finder lay on the stone floor of his ruined manor house, silent and motionless. Olive bent over the bard and shook him gently, whispering his name. The bard didn’t answer. He had a bolt in the back of his right shoulder and another in his left thigh. He was either very lucky, or the orcs were lousy shots, Olive thought. Very gently she eased the weapons from his flesh. Blood seeped from the wounds, but at least it didn’t gush out profusely. The wounds weren’t serious enough to have made him pass out.

It’s still the damned poison from the damned needle trap, Olive thought. The potion she’d given him wasn’t strong enough to counteract the poison. All she’d accomplished by pouring it in him was to prolong his dying for a few hours.