They went for much longer than Pash thought they would have. A few hours, at least. Fingers had been gone nearly the whole night, and now Pash knew where he had been. That, or the animal had really killed a person and was doing his best to locate a skeleton that he could pretend he had taken the hand from.
"Anyway, is it really that much better that he took the hand from a buried skeleton?" Pash asked suddenly.
"It's not that bad," Ermos said with a shrug, "they were dead already, after all. And that wasn't part of the law, was it? It was just no to kill people. He didn't kill anyone, so Fingers is still in the right."
"Maybe we should add that to the law," Pash suggested.
Ermos thought about it a moment and then he shook his head. "One day he might find a skeleton with a few golden rings on it. We'd want that hand then."
"But isn't it bad luck to disrespect the dead like that?" Pash asked.
"I don't think our luck can get any worse," Ermos said, "if we get any more bad luck, then it can only become good luck."
Pash was sure there was a flaw in that reasoning, but he couldn't think of a clever way of pointing it out. Besides, Fingers had already come to a stop in front of them.
There was a rocky cliff a little way up ahead with a few hats of grass and a few thin trees to cover it. Fingers led them to a spot before that, where a stream was quietly flowing downhill.
Sure enough, there was a hole dug into the ground and a neat pile of dirt next to it. Ermos wandered over and looked down into that hole and nodded. "Yup, definitely from this one."
Pash went next to him. Just as his master had said, the skeleton was missing an arm. Gently, Pash set the skeletal hand back in place, saying a quiet prayer in his head to show his respect. He was the first to step away from it. He found it more than unnerving looking at the skull of a dead man with the hollow eye sockets staring back at him.
"I wonder who he was," Ermos murmured, scratching the back of his head, taking a look around the forest. "Seems like a weird place to be buried, doesn't it? Nothing much going on around here, no towns or villages."
"Maybe he wasn't buried," Pash suggested.
"Nah, he'll have to have been," Ermos said. "If he wasn't buried, his bones would be scattered. Animals like Fingers would have been munching on him."
"That's true…" Pash realized.
"Exactly," Ermos grinned. "Which means, something must be special about this place, special enough that someone would want to be buried. Do you smell that Fingers? It smells to me like treasure."
Fingers did not have the human voice to respond with, but he did have the tail. Several wags of it said that he agreed.
"We'll climb up on top of that big cliff there and we'll take a look from the up high, see if we can spy the strangeness," Ermos said, pushing the mound of dirt back into the hole with his foot. "Ah, actually, why don't you lead us somewhere interesting, Fingers? You've got a good nose on you. Do you smell anything?"
Fingers was only too happy to take the lead again. His nose went to the floor and he wandered through the trees, before barking for them to follow, just as before. Oddly, he went the exact same way that Ermos had planned on going, towards that sheer stony cliff and its infection of thin trees.
The closer to the cliff they went, the less dense the plants became. Pash was actually able to walk without continually looking to the floor for logs that might catch his feet and trip him over. It was a real treat.
A certain tree caught his attention. There were all sorts of oddities in the deep forest if one cared to look. This particular tree must have had some spirit to it, for despite the rocky location of its residence it had grown thick and strong.
It was gnarled though, gnarled and twisted. A rather angry looking tree. It was right on the edge of that cliff, its roots dangling down like rope, bare and exposed.
As they drew closer, the tree grew even more fascinating. Rather than falling straight down to the ground, the roots arched like a hat over a dark cave.
At first, Pash thought the cave might have been the residence of a bear. It was odd-looking, for sure. Pash wasn't sure if it was just his imagination, but with the way the rocks were shaped, it looked like a skull with a wide-open mouth and the tree's roots were its hair.
"And… pause," Ermos held up his arm for Pash to stop where he was. Fingers had stopped as well and a low growl escaped his throat.
Pash strained his neck to look past the last of the tree branches to see what had gotten his master and their dog to slow and he too caught sight of them. Another skull. Just like the one that had been buried earlier. Bone that was browned and lifeless. Only, these skulls were not laid down in the dirt, they were two upright and flesh-less skeletons, standing as still as statues, but with a terrible menacing to them.