The massive slab of stone disappeared up into the ceiling of the passage with a rumbling sound, a small shower of stone chips and dust, and almost nothing to mark it as mobile at all. Jacques whistled softly: if he hadn't seen the thing go up, he would have no idea that it could come back down.
Beside him, Tybalt nodded. "That's some solid engineering. No wonder nobody could find them."
There was a commotion up ahead, and they started down the hall. A mixed group of humans and gnolls was coming towards them, and Jacques flagged them down with desperate movements. "Hold up! Wait!"
It took a moment for the workers to lose momentum; then they came to a gradual halt. "What is it?" asked one of the gnolls.
"We need to get Graznir down here. This place is crawling with undead, and they don't like anybody who isn't a Formorian being down here."
"Ah," said the gnoll. "That... isn't entirely unexpected." He turned to the others. "All right, Blunt-tusk, you go get Graznir. Local farmers, get back to the surface -- you should be safe there." He looked back to Jacques and Tybalt. "Where are the rest of you?"
"Waiting with the mummies, as a gesture of good faith."
"Brave," said the gnoll. "I'm Crack-bone, the work-leader. Technically, I'm an architect -- which is how I ended up directing the work crews."
"I'm a bit ashamed to admit it," said Jacques, "but I really didn't come here expecting to find a bunch of well-educated gnolls engaged in an archaeological dig."
Crack-bone snorted. "Oh, there are plenty who aren't," he admitted. "With the fall of the Kingdom, our people scattered, and whatever they had to in order to survive... and we can survive on diets that most civilized peoples would find criminal. That's where "Gnoll" comes from, in fact: it's an old Formorian word indicating something feral."
Jacques tucked that away. "Sounds like it's more polite to refer to you as Formorians, then," he said. "My apologies."
"Eh, don't worry about it." Crack-bone grinned. "It's been so long now, that's just etymology. Maybe we'll start making an issue of it someday, but it was a name we gave to our own."
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