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clumps, and she sniffed, rubbing her eyes with a fist. Sitting back in the rocking chair, Mrs. McLachlan began to rock, patting the baby in her arms, the rhythm calming the nanny as much as it soothed the child. After a few minutes, she gently removed the wooden spoon from Damp's unresisting hand.
    “No more wooden spoons for you, pet,” she said, smiling at the baby. “In fact, anything remotely resembling a wand has to be put away out of your reach. Like Sleeping Beauty and the spindle—one slip and we're doomed.”

Mud and Diamond
    ( A.D. 130: Uncharted depths of northern Scotland)
    U nder a dripping canopy of leaves in the heart of the Forest of Caledon, Nostrilamus picked the remains of last night's roasted hind from between his teeth and snarled at the laboring legionaries.
    “Can't you lot work any faster? A bunch of eunuchs armed with toothpicks could dig faster than
that
. Come on, put your backs into it!”
    Exhausted and dispirited, the legionaries doggedly sank their rusting spades into the mud and gritted what few remaining teeth they possessed. Hollow-cheeked and prematurely gray, the men bore little resemblance to the bronze musclemen they had been when they left the sun-kissed shores of Italia, full of hope and eagerly anticipating the adventure of a posting in Caledonia. It had been three long years since they had arrived here, spades in hand, to begin this idiotic treasure hunt. Three interminable years of rain, mud, and misery. Sleeping in leaky tents, eating only what they could catch in the forest, waking every dawn to the sound of rain, and fueled on little more than acorn porridge, the legionaries began to suspect they were digging their own graves. As if that wasn't bad enough, the depressed Romans had to endure dragon attacks—which came with no warning and inevitably proved fatal.
    “Hold it!”
Nostrilamus left the shelter of his tree and limped toward them, his emaciated frame barely able to support the weight of his rusty armor, his boil-encrusted ankles spattered with mud from the trailing hem of his once-fine woollen cloak—now a tattered rag that gave scant warmth and served only as a reminder of how far he had fallen from grace. “There. That there. What is it?” Nostrilamus, the once autocratic Malefica of Caledon, wheezed like a set of leaky bellows as he peered into the muddy pit in which his men stood, knee-deep in icy sludge, picking fitfully at the walls of mud that rose above their heads, their battered shovels hardly equal to the task. With a clawlike hand, Nostrilamus pointed to where he could just see a shard of metal glinting in the surrounding rocks and clay. Despite prolonged burial in mud, its silver color seemed undamaged, and it was this that had drawn his eye. On shaking legs he climbed down into the pit and waded over to where his men stood propped on their shovels, praying to Jupiter that
this
time they'd struck pay dirt.
    There had been numerous false alarms along the way: the half-buried weapons and armor of their deceased predecessors, peeled of their inedible shell of breastplates and helmets and devoured whole by the dragons like some soft-fleshed Italian delicacy. Astoroth's vellum map, which Nostrilamus had used to try to locate the demon's treasure, had long since disintegrated in the perpetual drizzle, but by then, having pored over it so often, the legionaries could have redrawn it in their sleep. They had dug so many holes in the hope of finding treasure that the floor of the Forest of Caledon looked as if it had been struck by a meteor shower. So the legionaries betrayed little excitement as their commander scrabbled with his fingernails at the earth surrounding the outcrop of gleaming metal.
    “Yes. Yes. Yessss!” Nostrilamus hissed. “This is
it
! Toadflax, get over here and dig, but
carefully,
man—damage it and I'll have you posted to Siberius.”
    The chosen Toadflax sloshed forward, shovel raised to
shoulder-height, and began to pick