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"What is it?" the sellsword asked Montaron, hoping to cover his embarrassment.
"A body," Xzar said simply, "a body that is dead."
Abdel squinted and stepped forward, crushing a couple of the flowers. Montaron flinched when he saw that, and
Abdel ignored the halfling, who stared at him for the next several minutes as if expecting some change to come over
him. Abdel looked down at the body at Montaron's feet. The man had been dead for days, but there was still very little
decay. There were no flies, which was what Abdel thought most peculiar. A body laying dead in the open for days
tended to attract flies. The dead man was human, dressed in the simple ring mail of an inexperienced mercenary or a
common foot soldier. The man's eyes were white, going to gray-green. His tongue was sticking out, swollen and black.
There was no blood or obvious wounds.
"What killed this man?" Abdel asked, not really expecting an answer.
"Poison, yes?" Xzar offered, avoiding eye contact with Abdel, as always.
Abdel nodded, seeing the truth in it. Montaron knelt over the man and started running his hands along the dead
soldier's belt.
"Montaron!" Jaheira gasped. "Leave him in peace, can't you?"
"She's right, Montaron," Abdel said. "Leave him."
Montaron ignored them, standing and turning around only when he'd found something.
"Keys?" Abdel asked when he saw what the halfling was holding in his hands. There was a whole set of them, half a
dozen big brass keys on a simple iron ring.
"If you can find out where this man lived," Khalid said, sneering, "you'll be a rich man for sure, thief."
Montaron smiled and looked over his shoulder at the collapsing farmhouse.
"Close enough?" he said.
A chill ran down Abdel's spine at the thought of the thief gobbling up what memories might be left in that perfect
house, that house he should have grown up in. The sell-sword shook his head, trying to shake these odd, weak,
melancholy thoughts loose. He caught Xzar's eye and returned the mage's knowing smirk with a curl of his lip.
Abdel snatched the keys violently from Montaron's grip and squeezed them in his big, callused hand until he
thought they might puncture his skin.
"Leave it," Abdel said, "and him. We started this trip by heading for the mines, and now we're going to get to those
mines."
Abdel turned and walked on, and Montaron let the sell-sword lead the way only as long as it took for him to
exchange a long, knowing glance with Xzar. The mage nodded and followed.
* * * * *
Abdel had never been in a mine before, but this one was much as he'd expected. The tunnel was simple, square, with
a low ceiling held up at intervals of fifteen or twenty feet by large wooden supports. The walls were rough cut into
solid rock from the entrance in the side of a deep mine pit. The mining complex was only a couple hours' walk from the
field of black flowers.
When they'd emerged from Montaron's shortcut path, they'd stumbled into a group of tired looking miners heading
back toward Nashkel with picks and shovels but no cart of ore. The miners gave them only a passing glance, and
Abdel's odd little party made their way against a flow of dirty, obviously unhappy men to the edge of the pit. A group
of Amnian soldiers didn't so much guard as hang around the steps leading into the mine. A big, sooty, dark-skinned
man looked to be in charge of the place. He scowled at the soldiers with obvious irritation, and the youthful Amnian
sergeant tried not to notice.
"There is definitely something wrong here," Abdel said later, his voice echoing in the mine tunnel.
"Aye, kid," Montaron's equally resonant voice answered from the gloom behind him, "an' that big fat Emerson fella's
willin' to pay to have a stop put to it."
When they had first arrived at the pit, Emerson, the mine boss, had reached into an ore cart and produced a fist-size
lump of gray-brown rock. He squeezed it, and it crumbled to dust. The boss cursed loudly and threw the handful of
worthless iron dust to the dry ground where it mixed with more of the same. He turned his back on the cart and walked
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