The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [1]
The shortest, stoutest one chuckled merrily and said in his raw, broken trumpet of a voice, "I can hardly elude my born duty to be the dwarf…so that leaves it to ye three to be 'over-clever.' Even with the triple muster, I'm not before-all-the-gods sure you've wits enough…"
"That'll do," the elf standing beside him said, his tones as gruff as any dwarf could manage. "It's not a name I'm in overmuch favor of, anyway. I don't want a joke name. How can we feel proud…"
"Strut around, you mean," the dwarf murmured.
"…wearing a jest we're sure to become heartily sick of after a month, at most. Why not something exotic, something…" He waved his hand as if willing inspiration to burst forth. A moment later, obligingly, it did. "Something like the Steel Rose."
There was a moment of considering silence, which Iyriklaunavan could count as something of a victory, before Folossan chuckled again and asked, "You want me to forge some flowers for us to wear? Belt buckles? Codpieces?"
Amandarn stopped rubbing his bruises long enough to ask witheringly, "Do you have to make a joke of everything, Lossum? I like that name."
The woman who towered over them all in her blackened armor said slowly, "But I don't know that I do, Sir Thief. I was called something similar when I was a slave, thanks to the whippings my disobedience brought me. A 'steel rose' is a welt raised by a steel-barbed whip." The merry dwarf shrugged. "That makes it a bad name for a brace of bold and menacing adventurers?" he asked.
Amandarn snorted at that description. Nuressa's mouth tightened into a thin line that the others had learned to respect. "A slaver who makes steel roses is deemed careless with a whip or unable to control his temper. Such a welt lowers the value of a slave. Good slavers have other ways of causing pain without leaving marks. So you'll be saying we're careless and unable to control ourselves."
"Seems even more fitting, then, to me," the dwarf told the nearest stone pillar, then jumped back with a strangled oath as it cracked across and a great shard of stone tumbled down at him, crashing through a sudden flurry of tensely raised weapons.
Dust swirled in the silence, but nothing else moved. After what seemed like a long time, Nuressa lowered her blade and muttered, "We've wasted quite enough time on one more silly argument about what to call ourselves. Let it be spoken of later. Amandarn, you were finding us a safe way into yon…"
"Waiting tomb," Folossan murmured smoothly, grinning sheepishly under the sudden weight of the three dark, annoyed glares.
In near silence the thief moved forward, hands spread for balance, his soft-soled boots gripping the loose stones. Perhaps a dozen strides ahead lay a dark and gaping opening in the side of a broken-spired bulk of stone that had once been the heart of a mighty palace but now stood like a forlorn and forgotten cottage amid leaning pillars and heaps of fern-girt rubble.
Iyriklaunavan took a few steps forward to better watch Amandarn's slow and careful advance. As the slim, almost child-sized thief came to a halt just outside the ruined walls to peer warily ahead, the maroon-robed elf whispered, "I have a bad feeling about this…"
Folossan waved a dismissive hand and said, "You have a bad feeling about everything, O gruffest of elves."
Nuressa jostled both of them into silence as Amandarn suddenly broke his immobility, gliding forward and out of sight.
They waited. And waited. Iyriklaunavan cleared his throat as quietly as he could, but the sound in his throat still seemed startlingly loud even to him. An eerie, waiting stillness seemed to hang over the ruins. A bird crossed the distant sky without calling, the beats of its wings seeming to measure a time that had grown too long.
Something had happened to Amandarn.
A very quiet doom? They'd heard nothing… and as the tense breaths of time dragged on, heard more of it.
Nuressa found herself walking slowly toward the hole where Amandarn had gone, her boots crunching on the shifting stones where