reservoir’s gravelly shore with his staff, searching for more traditional traps. He overturned a few charred lumps that might have been parts of huts or humans, but nothing that would tell anyone what had happened here less than two quinths ago, if Mahtra hadn’t told them.
When they got to the far shore, they found each bowl mounted on its own platform that leaned over the water. The silvery scaffolds shone with light as well as reflecting the greater light of the bowls they held. Caution said, look, don’t touch, but Pavek was a high templar who’d painted the Lion-King’s kilts. He wasn’t afraid of a bit of glamour, and he recognized a ladder in the scaffold’s regular cross-pieces. With his medallion against his palm, he touched a glowing strut.
“I’ll be—” he began, then caught himself. “It’s made of bones!”
Pavek ran the medallion from one lashing to the next, absorbing the silver glow. The scaffolding that emerged from the glamour was constructed from bones of every description. It was thoroughly ingenious, but except for the glamour—which was a simple deception and not much of one at that—it was completely nonmagical. He tested the built-in ladder and, finding it strong enough to bear his weight, scrambled up to the platform. Ruari came after him, but the other two stayed on the ground.
Pavek scrubbed the bowl’s side with Lord Hamanu’s medallion, hoping to dispel the glowing, shifting colors. The glamour here was stronger. His arm ached before he could see the bowl’s true substance: not stone, as he’d first thought, but a patchwork of leather set on top of a patchwork of bones.
There was a pattern: leather and bones, a lot of leather, a lot of bones. Pavek felt a word rising through his own thick thoughts, but without breaking the surface, the word was gone when the bowl suddenly shuddered.
Hand on his sword, he turned around in time to see Ruari tottering on the bowl’s rim. Demonstrating a singular lack of foresight, the half-elf had apparently tried to leap up there from the scaffold, but all those losing contests with his elven cousins finally yielded a victory. Ruari thrust his staff forward and down into the bowl. The move acted as a counterbalance, and he stood steady a moment before leaping lightly back to the scaffold platform beside Pavek.
Slop from the tip of Ruari’s staff struck Pavek’s leg. It was warm, slimy, and unspeakably foul. Pavek swiped it off with his fingers, then shook his hand frantically. Ruari reversed the staff to get his own closer view of the remaining gook.
He touched it, sniffed it, and would have touched it a second time with the tip of his tongue—if Pavek hadn’t swung at the staff and sent it flying.
“Have you lost what little wit you were born with, scum?”
Ruari drew himself up to his full height, a good head-and-a-half taller than Pavek. “I was going to find out whether it was wholesome or not. Druids can do that, you know. Not bumble-thumbs like you, but real druids.”
“Idiots can do it, too, the same way you were going to do it! Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy—the stuff’s poison!”
“Poison?”
Ruari stared at the dark slime on his fingers, and, judging by his puzzled expression, saw something entirely different. So Pavek grabbed Ruari’s hand and smeared the sludge clinging to the half-elf’s hand across the medallion, where it hissed and steamed with a frightful stench. Ruari was properly appalled.
“Laq?” he whispered.
“Damned if I know.”
“Laq?” Zvain shouted from the ground where he brandished Ruari’s staff.
“You keep your hands away from that tip—understand!” Pavek shouted, which only drew the boy’s attention to that exact part of the staff, which he promptly touched.
Pavek leapt to the ground, twisting his ankle on the landing. By the time things were sorted out, both he and Zvain were limping and Ruari had joined them.
“This time, Kakzim’s trying to” poison Urik’s water,” the half-elf said, proud that he’d deciphered the purpose of the bowls.
“Looks like it,” Pavek agreed, putting weight gingerly on his sore ankle. “Had to get rid of the folk living here so he could build these damn bone scaffolds and skin bowls!” Which, while true, were not the wisest words he’d ever uttered.
Mahtra raised her head to. stare wide-eyed at the bowls. It didn’t take mind-bending to guess what kind of skin she thought Kakzim had used to make them.
Mahtra shrieked, “Father!” She took off at a run for the nearest scaffold.