By touch and by gloom, you explore the ruined intersection. The fact that it is starting to buckle here and now is testimony to dwarven engineering - that spidering crack from the demolished tunnel west suggests that unmaking is the cause of the weakness, and even that has taken a great age to manifest. You find a shard of pale stone in the rubble that suits your purpose: it seems to be from high up on the archway, shaken loose with the jolt of the ancient collapse. A smoothly fractured isosceletic wedge of stone that is almost a blade in shape, and its edge would abrade flesh instead of drawing blood. A corner of some intricate border mural of the greater carving is here; most of a dwarf and the shins of an elf back to back in the midst of some deed of glory. The detail on them is remarkable for the medium, and the very corner which corresponded to the corner of the block it once belonged to features an irregular shape you think is a dwarven numeral or character. You remember the dwarven banker and his apprentice, marking out their complex deals with hammered runic punches. A maker's mark? A signature? A graffito? Perhaps you will know, some day.

Back on the surface, you collaborate with Bella to pop the boy's hip back into place before the swelling can get any worse. He lets out a monstrous howl at the pain of it, but it's better now than later and he's fortunate to have a band of friends and family here to help him home. Poor though they are, with the boy thought lost returned to their number battered but not maimed or dead, they are in rich spirits indeed.

"Oh, Taalia!" Bella exclaims in alarm out of the blue, having noticed just now what you notice a moment after looking down at yourself. Your front is smeared and marred with charcoal black from handling the boy. Charcoal stains are treacherous, and you aren't afforded a chance to do much about them on the road. Where it's rubbed on your armor, you'll get most of it out with effort when you stop to camp. Where it has rubbed to your collar and the places where your gambeson and cloth are exposed... Well, you won't soon forget your journey through northern Carcassonne.

Jean-Paul's uncle, Jean-Michel, is profuse with his thanks to you directly while Briant confers with another of the burners and writes a letter for them to give to their lord about the location of the sinkhole, and suggestion to fence it off. Jean-Michel's praise comes in such a rapid fire Breton patter, curled with his local dialect, that it strains your fledgling grasp of the language.

"Que les dieux vous bénissent, madame, que les dieux vous bénissent, vous et votre belle amie, le seigneur et son cheval, bénédictions à vous tous. Taal embrasse tes têtes, Taal embrasse tes mains ! Comme nous pleurerions de perdre Jean-Paul - il est si intelligent, si intelligent - et comme sa mère me tuerait sûrement s'il mourait sous mes soins!"

He has little wealth to offer in reward even if you would take it, and charcoal is no particular use to you on the road. But he wants to give you something precious to him, all the same - a little wooden carving of a man, bearded and crowned with antlers, holding a bow close to himself. Most depictions of Karnos you saw back in Tilea had him with bow and spear, and this idol has only a bow held to his chest, but there is no doubt that this is a talisman devoted to that god, known in the lands north of the mountains as Taal. The idol was once pale ash wood, but is now well blackened by the grip of its owner. The face and hands on the idol are brighter, and more smoothed by the attention of the nervous thumb in nervous times.