A long thin belt of scarlet leather encircled the man's waist. The belt buckle was a large elaborate affair of chased silver, styled as a winged serpent eating its own tail. The serpent's wings fit over and under the circle, locking the belt into place. "The belt," repeated Kid firmly.

"Shall I cut it off him?" Ivy slid her sword out of its scabbard.

"No, no, my dear." Kid grasped her arm and pulled the blade back. "You might damage the magic if you cut it. Unlock the buckle, instead. The wings should move."

Ivy had to stand on tiptoe to get a firm grip on the belt buckle. She waggled the wings left and then right.

"Gently, gently, my dear." Kid was hopping from one hoof to the other, sending little pebbles rolling down the rubble pile with his fidgeting.

"I'm trying," Ivy grunted. The smell of dust, moid, and rot filled her nose, much more noticeable now that they had been hauling on the corpse. With her nose that much closer to the body, Ivy could easily smell the must of a corpse long, long past its prime. The belt buckle was uncommonly stiff and seemed permanently locked in position. She stretched up her left hand, candlelight winking on the harper's token on her glove, and twisted the whole serpent while she hung onto its wings with her right hand. With a snap, the two wings folded back. The belt and the corpse came crashing down on top of her, knocking her back on the pile of rubble.

Kid dragged the body off her and helped her to sit up. Ivy gasped a few times until her breath came back. She was not afraid of dead things, not in her line of work, but still. There was something extremely unpleasant about being felled by a rotting corpse.

"He was heavier than he looked," she finally gasped, hunching forward to ease the pressure on her thrice-bruised belly.

The belt hung limply in her grasp. Ivy shook it. The belt still hung straight down. "So, you figured how to get it down. Do you know how to make it go up again?"

"I think so, my dear." Kid ran his clever little fingers round and round the buckle. "This was wrought in imitation of the belts that the ancient ones used to fly to their floating cities. This man must have been one like Toram, who sought to imitate the great wizards of Netheril. Or perhaps he hoped to fly to one of the lost cities and plunder it. But such ambitions are treacherous."

"And you know this because…"

"I was Toram's godsight goat." Kid repeated Archlis's earlier words with a bitter, harsh tone quite unlike his normal fluting voice. "When Toram owned me, he trained me to know such magic as this, artifacts that he found in old tombs and crypts. To sniff such objects out for him. I told you Toram was a great grave robber. And all his magic he stole from others, as Archlis stole his power from him. Toram once said that I had a demon's knack for stealing old magic."

"And here I thought that you would have made a better thief without the horns and hooves," Ivy said, but she reached out a hand and ruffled his curls gently as a mute apology.

"After I ran away, my looks did betray me often, my dear," said Kid with a peculiar sound, halfway between a sigh and a laugh. "People drove me out of their towns with curses. I had no home until I met you."

Ivy remembered how she had almost broken Kid's hand the first time that they met (the hand had been cutting away her purse, and she had grabbed it and jerked without thinking). As an apology for her actions, she had chucked Kid over her shoulder and carried him back home for a hot meal. Kid had seemed a little surprised by her actions. But, as she told Mumchance later, it was the bad example that the dwarf set-dragging home all those stray dogs-that had made her drag home the cloven-hoofed thief.

"Well," Mumchance had said at the time, looking Kid over from his horns to his hooves. "You know the rules, Ivy. You made them. If you bring it home, you're responsible for it." But the dwarf, for all his casual airs, grew as bad as the rest of them, sneaking food onto Kid's plate when he wasn't looking and muttering about how he was too thin.

Ivy had always meant to ask Kid about his past. Perhaps sitting on a pile of rubble with a corpse was not the best time. But the sheer obsessive curiosity that she had inherited from both of her parents loosened her lips. "So how did you end up being owned by this Toram?"

Kid kept his eyes on the belt, waggling the wings left and right on the buckle, and then running the leather through his hands. He no longer wore his normal, pleasant expression-a slight smile and mildly sinister tilt of the eyebrow. Instead, his face was blank as though he were working harder than usual to hide his emotions from Ivy.

"When I was so small that I have no earlier memories, the Red Wizards kept me locked in a stone room. Toram came to their temple. He worked as a spy for them from time to time in return for glimpses of their scrolls and magic books. How he learned of me, I do not know, but one night he broke the lock and took me away bundled under his cloak."

"Red Wizards? You mean he stole you from Thay?" The legendary wrath and sheer terror evoked by even a whisper of Thay meant that the wizard Toram had to be exceptionally brave or, more likely, completely insane. Nobody stole from Thay if they wanted to keep their body intact and their soul out of eternal suffering. Even Ivy's mother, that reckless bard who regarded sea serpents as exceptionally annoying large fish, had warned her daughter specifically against encounters with anyone who even smelled like they might wear the scarlet robes. When she asked her father about Thay, he had simply rolled back his sleeves to show the horrible scars on his forearms left by one chance encounter with those terrible wizards.

"Toram wished to find the ancient magic," explained Kid. "He said my kind had a greater sensitivity than others to such artifacts, both beneficial and destructive-especially the destructive kind. As I said, he taught me ways to feel out such objects, to know their history and how they work."

"Godsight?"

"That is what he and Archlis called it." Kid gave another twist of the silver serpent's wings and clicked his tongue when the wings did not move as he expected. "They were partners once."

"You did not mention that you knew Fottergrim's favorite spellcaster when we took the job."

"Archlis used another name when he worked with Toram. Besides, all humans look a bit alike to me. I did not recognize him until I saw Toram's Ankh in his hands and sniffed his scent. Then I realized how he had been throwing so many fireballs off the walls of Tsurlagol."

"What exactly did Archlis do to Toram?"

"He struck him down and left him to die in Anauroch." Kid's entire skin shivered, rather like a horse that had an unpleasant bug walk across its hide. "Archlis thought then that I would serve him as I had served Toram."

"But you didn't stay with him."

"I bit his hand to the bone. You can still see the scar if you look close," said Kid with grim satisfaction. "When he dropped me, I ran away as quickly as I could go."

Ivy remembered when she caught Kid picking her pockets.

"I guess I'm lucky that you didn't try biting off my hand."

"Oh no, my dear," said Kid in his usual gentle voice. He glanced at her, the stony look on his face softening. "I would never hurt you or the others. I told you, I have a great sensitivity to that which is destructive and that which is not. It is like this light." He passed one hand through the candle flame without flinching. "A warmth and comfort shone from you. It has never dimmed, but only grown stronger over the years."

Ivy did not know how to respond, and Kid seemed to expect no reply. With a nod of satisfaction, he pulled the wings apart repeatedly and then snapped them back together again. The belt floated toward the ceiling. Ivy grabbed it and pulled it back down again. Kid twisted the wings, and the belt lay still in their grasp.