Adam wrote:Bennedict is just getting ready to ask some details about these lizard men, when the unicorn starts to speak.
Shaking his head, he fetches out his pipe and lights it. "I suppose I should be on the look out for gingerbread houses, next."
He turns, however, at the mention of smoke. "Is there a camp somewhere nearby? Perhaps the lizard people know more about how to find the dragon."
A passing whiff of smoke, so thin only the sensitive nostrils of a beast noticed it, isn't much to go on.
The search for the source takes several minutes of searching, walking, sniffing, and skulking about the swamp.
But then, having walked slowly, cautiously north through the cypresses and splashed across a flooded field of brown reeds, Benn and the others stop at the edge of a copse of cypresses and observe a smudge of gray-white smoke rising skyward from a large earth and timber mound. A crescent shaped lakelet separates them from the seemingly artificial hill. The actual source of the smoke remains hidden by the sloped muddy walls.
This is the same structure that Meela had spotted earlier while out scouting, near which she discovered the big black scale.
The trees provide concealment but to get near the mound from any direction except maybe its far side (which is not visible from here, of course) one must cross about twenty paces of open ground or water.
A skilled woodsman could find some concealment on the way: tree stumps, brush, fallen logs, clumps of reeds.
