We reached Bob and find to our surprise that following his defensive posture, he'd reached a lull in the fighting. He had begun talking to the orcish enemy, taunting them we think (we couldn't understand a word of what he was saying, and pretty much every word of orcish sounds like a taunt). They were, it turned out, accusing him of being a Raven, just as he took another blow. He was spent, and with the jumping magic still active on him, he leapt backwards out of the fight.
At this point Bernie took the chance to take a snapshot. Our approach in what is now numbers causes the enemies to retreat into the mine behind them, abandoning the body of one of their comrades that Bob had dealt with. Redamber checks the body over for Raven tattoos while Bob keeps an eye out towards the dark entrance of the mine. There are none.
Taking a breath, we stopped for a moment, and spent a few minutes helping Bob with his wounds. Once he was suitably patched up, we pressed on into the mine in (late) pursuit of the enemy.
As we stumble on in the darkness we came across a shaft running vertically down into the mines. There was a mechanism next to it to allow access to the mines below, and Bob volunteered to be lowered down first. There is no ambush waiting for us at the bottom, and eventually we all join Bob in the darkness below.
The chamber at the bottom of this shaft was quite unusual; it had iron pyrites glistening in the roughly cut walls. Our target is the orcs, though, so we ignored the décor pressed on into the mines. As we headed down another corridor we heard a spine chilling scream of pain from somewhere ahead of us. We pressed on more quickly and found the dead body of a human laying in the shaft a little further on. He was killed by some kind of slashing weapon across the back, we suspect it was probably a sword.
Pressing on further to try and find what it was that killed the victim behind us, and as we passed a side corridor we were attacked by a skeleton wielding a sabre. Our weaponry isn't really cut out for this kind of opponent - we give it a few tickles with blade weapons, before Tatty, the wizard, smacked it hard with his war-hammer. In that melee he took a hit himself, just as another skeleton turns up to join in the fight.