one. Maybe she would get lucky and fall over another dead body wearing a cap.
Luckily, her gauntlets, armored and lined with sheepskin, had survived the fall and were still stuck in her weapons belt. She pulled them on to protect her hands from the cold water. Besides, the scaled armor on the knuckles of her gloves made a formidable weapon if something jumped her before she could draw her blade.
Ivy stood in the darkness, with water hissing past her, and blinked. She blinked again. It was still pitch black, and she couldn't see anything. She patted her pouch. She had her tinder and flint but no candles. The icy current hissed past her hips and she heard a faint splashing sound farther down. She tried a hesitant step forward. It felt like she were moving downhill. Ivy lost her footing, slipped, and slid under the water again.
When she surfaced, cursing steadily, the water sloshed off her. The sound of her splashing progress made it impossible to judge what direction she was heading. The river was not deep, just bitter cold as if it ran underground from a mountaintop glacier. Freezing to death seemed more likely than drowning. Ivy started moving, deciding it made no sense to stay still and shudder herself into pieces. If she ran into any sort of enemy—a hobgoblin or an ore seemed likely with a city full of them nearby—she wasn't sure how well she could swing her sword while shivering.
With no light, she relied on her less-than-perfect human hearing to get her bearing. She listened for her friends but could hear nothing save the increasing howl of the river rushing past her. Moving against the current pulled her further off balance, so she decided to wade downstream, hoping to hit some type of bank. She yelled and waited to hear some answer, but her own yells boomed in echoes and confused her
sense of direction more. Low ceiling, Ivy guessed, and rock all around her.
Her boots slipped on the rocky bottom, and she half-fell, half-floated. Getting her feet under her, Ivy realized that the water was creeping up her chest. She needed to find dry land fast. Surging forward, she clanged against a metal grate. The shock jarred her through her armor.
With another curse, Ivy began to feel along the grate. Her armored gloves scraped across the grate with a piercing screech of metal on metal that made her wince. The metal grid rose higher than her head. Knowing that she could not get any wetter, Ivy drew a deep breath and dived. Feeling under the water, she found the grate extended down to the river bottom, leaving only a hand's width of space between it and the stone.
Resurfacing, she felt along the grate, all the time whistling as loud as she could past chattering teeth, being half-winded and steadily more chilled by the water. She might not be able to hear her friends, but she knew that if they were in range, they should be able to hear her. Being right-handed, Ivy groped toward the right along the cold metal.
Out of the corner of her left eye, she saw a faint glimmer of light. The light jerked and weaved toward her. Flattening her back against the grate, Ivy drew her sword from her dripping scabbard. She waited where she was, to see if it were friend or foe that advanced upon her.
A high yip-yap-yap sounded from the source of the light. Ivy sighed and one-handedly, over the shoulder, sheathed her sword and sneezed. The bouncing light resolved itself into Mumchance, running clumsily along the bank of the underground river, while Wiggles weaved around his ankles. When he saw her, he stopped running and bent over, breathing heavily. He was an old dwarf, and running in full chain mail and leather, also sodden with water, had left him out of breath.
"I thought we'd be in the sea before you stopped swimming," Mumchance panted. "Didn't you hear us yelling for you?
"By the time I got my ears out of the river, all I could hear was water," grumbled Ivy as she sloshed to the bank, guided by Mumchance's lantern. "Where were you? Is everyone safe?"
"We were directly behind you. You kept swimming downriver, away from us as fast as you could go." Mumchance twisted his head up to get a clear look at her with his one good eye. He was trying to look fierce, but the smile pulling his scars askew undercut the attempt to scold her. "Daft human!" It was his worst epithet at such times.
"Wasn't swimming. I was busy trying not to drown." Ivy heaved herself inelegantly out of the water, the bank being almost shoulder-high; so she more rolled and flopped than lifted herself out of the river. The hilt of the sword on her back poked into her neck. She lay on the bank, nose to nose with Wiggles, who pranced back from her. The dog obviously considered one unexpected bath enough of a wetting for one day and did not want Ivy dripping on her. Ivy sneezed again and heard, far in the distance, an answering sneeze.
"Zuzzara," said Mumchance. "She sounds like a trumpet down here, doesn't she. What are you waiting for? Don't expect me to carry you, do you?"
"Just getting my breath back," sighed Ivy as she shifted into a sitting position. Out of the river, she felt even wetter and colder than she had in the water. To think that only this morning, she had cursed every layer of armor worn in the summer heat. Cold, wet, and surrounded by darkness, she wondered why dwarves liked living underground. Give her the dust, stink, and sweet summer heat of the siege camp over this!
"Hope Gunderal brought along one of her warming potions," the shivering Ivy said as she swung to her feet.
Mumchance and Ivy trudged back to the group, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind them.
"Gunderal's the only one who didn't fall in the river," said Mumchance. Ivy looked down at him. It was impossible to see the dwarf s face underneath his helmet from this angle, but his voice sounded worried, which worried her further. "Hit the rocks hard instead."
"Of course, the one who can breathe underwater and has webbed toes never goes in the water!" said Ivy, trying to coax a smile out of the old dwarf. Usually misfortune drew a bitter chuckle out of Mumchance, who took the admirable view that if you could not laugh at bad luck, then you would spend your life crying. But the dwarf did not respond to her feeble joke—another bad sign. "What makes you more sour than an old pickle?"
"My belt came loose in the fall. My best hammer and my pick are underwater somewhere down here." Mumchance's gloom was blacker than the hole they were in. He adored his tools and took excellent care of all of them. The pick was only a hundred years old or so, but it was a favorite of his. Ivy glanced at him. The dwarf still had his short sword fastened securely to his weapons belt as well as a small spare hammer, but that wouldn't help them dig their way out of the tunnel.
"Well, I have my sword and dagger," said Ivy, doing a mental inventory of what weapons they might have.
"And I've got my eye." In the lantern's light, the diamond under his left eyebrow flashed. When he was young, Mumchance had been caught in a mine fire. The flames scarred his face and ruined his left eye. When he had enough gold, he paid another dwarf to carve him an eye out of a black sapphire. That was the first of his gem eyes, and he had sold it two hundred years ago to join an expedition to the Great Rift. Since then, he had owned several gem eyes—some magical,
some not. Keeping a gem in an empty eye socket was as good a place as any to hide his wealth, he once told Ivy. After all, even the most ruthless of tax collectors or the most skillful of thieves did not want to plunge their fingers into the eye socket of an elderly dwarf.
His current hidden treasure was a gem bomb made from a polished diamond. Although his right eye was a dark green, many people did not realize that the left one was a fake. The advantage of having extremely bushy eyebrows and equally bushy eyelashes, claimed Mumchance.
"This stayed stuck," said the dwarf, popping the fake eye out and then tapping it back into the socket—a gesture that always made Ivy a bit nauseated, "even when I fell tail over head into the water."
"At least you landed on the hardest part of your anatomy," Ivy said. The dwarf snorted. "No, it's good to see that diamond sparkle. We want you staying pretty." It was a running joke between them: that his current fake eye could keep them all pretty in a bad situation. Gem bombs cost a terrific amount, but Ivy had been happy to pay her share of the expense for this particular diamond.
"Not losing the gem bomb is the only bit of good luck that we have had. You'll see," the dwarf pronounced in despondent tones. Mumchance's expression could have won him a prize for the champion pessimist of the Vast.
When Ivy reached Zuzzara and Gunderal, she found the wizard looking paler than ever. She was clutching one arm and turning blue-white around the mouth from pain. Ivy knelt by Gunderal's side. In the dim light of Mumchance's lantern, even Ivy could clearly see that the wizard's arm was dappled with bruises. Pulling off her gloves and thrusting them through her belt, Ivy felt along Gunderal's arm with as gentle a touch as she could manage. The wizard bit her lip and didn't say anything
while Zuzzara grumbled, "Don't pull so hard. She's already fainted once."
"At least you smell better," joked Gunderal with white-lipped gallantry as Ivy poked and prodded her arm. "More like cold water than camel."
"I've had a bath since we last talked," Ivy quipped. To a worried Zuzzara, she said, "No breaks."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," said Ivy with more conviction in her voice than truth. She was no healer, able to sense what lay beneath the skin. She hadn't felt any movement in the bones, but that didn't mean the arm wasn't broken. "Strap it tight, Zuzzara, so she can't jostle it. Do you have any of your healing potions with you, Gunderal?"
Gunderal nodded her chin toward a smoldering mass of leather and broken glass. Puffs of noxious purple steam rose from it. "My potions bag is useless. Everything broke and mixed together."
Ivy hid her dismay with a shrug and a wave of her hand. "When did you ever need potions for your spells? Can you dry us off a little? Once Zuzzara has your arm tight?"
"I can't even make a light," sighed Gunderal. "I'm sorry, Ivy, I tried earlier when we were looking for you. It hurts, and I can't move my hand, and the words run together ..."
"Just stop trying," growled Zuzzara. "You always try too hard."
"You don't understand," Gunderal snapped back, a slight flush of anger warming her wan features. "Magic is not just waving your hands and shouting some words. It takes concentration. I certainly can't concentrate with you fussing at me."
"Not to worry," said Ivy, hoping to avoid an argument between the two. Zuzzara would throw her body between any danger and Gunderal, but then she always turned around and fussed at the little wizard, which always set off Gunderal. This
could lead to some odd results when she was spellcasting, like that flood when all they wanted was a little gentle rain. "Who needs magic?" Ivy added. "We can get out of here without your spells. Just rest now."
Mumchance shook his head at Ivy. "It's not new spells that should worry you. It's what she started before we fell in here."
"What?"
"Look at the water." The dwarf swung his lantern over the river. The river flowed along the very top edge of the bank. "She's been pulling all the water toward Tsurlagol for the last few days."
"To undermine the wall."
"Well, it's working very nicely," said Mumchance. "It undercut our tunnel and now it's rising higher."
"Can we get out the way that we fell in?"
Mumchance grunted. It was not a happy sound. "I sent Kid and that Procampur fellow to look. But I doubt it. The ceiling of the tunnel has probably collapsed between here and the entrance. We're buried alive and in danger of drowning."
Ivy stared into the darkness, listening to the water hissing below her. "That is a pleasant way to put it," she said at last. "Any bad news?"
Mumchance shook his head. "It could be worse. I can smell fresh air—well, not too stale air—and so could Kid."
"So another way out?"
The dwarf shrugged. "Hope so."
A clatter of hooves against stone announced the return of Kid and Sanval. They shared the party's other light between them, one of Kid's candles stuck in an earthenware bowl. Kid always had candles, bits of string, and a few odd dishes tucked in his clothing. Apparently some of his treasures had survived the fall.
"Blow it out," said Ivy, gesturing at the candle. Kid did as she asked, but Sanval looked like he wanted to protest at
the sudden lack of light. With only Mumchance's lantern to hold back the darkness, the humans were at a distinct disadvantage.
"Why do that?" Sanval asked. He kept his voice low and polite, just as if they were sitting in the camp. He hadn't shouted, yelled, or screamed, although Ivy would have done all those things, and a bit more, if she had been dropped through somebody else's tunnel into this mess. Since she was the one who had started this tunnel, she was just managing to swallow her temper. After all, it would do her no good to scream at herself and it would worry the others.
For Sanval, she gave a fuller explanation than usual, mostly because she knew Procampur's forces were predominately human, and he'd probably never fought beside dwarves, half-ores, half-genasi, and whatever Kid was (one of these days, Ivy meant to figure that out, but she wasn't too sure that she'd like the answer). "Because we may need that candle later," she explained to Sanval. "And by we, I mean you and me. The others can see in the dark."
"It's not so much seeing," explained Zuzzara, as she worked with a quick gentleness to bind Gunderal's arm into a comfortable position. For now, the half-ore seemed content to play nurse rather than nag.
"It's more like using the other senses. Sometimes a scent can have color and texture," said Gunderal.
"Smell, and sound, and touch, my dear," said Kid, with a tilt of his head.
"Even with one eye, I can see farther in the dark than any human." Mumchance snorted.
"So we can't afford to waste a candle while the lantern still has fuel," Ivy concluded. "We save the light and trust the others—by which I mean everyone who isn't human—to keep watch."
"It is your company, Captain," said Sanval, giving Ivy a title that she rarely used. But he was right; she held the high rank in their group, if only because nobody else wanted the title, and it sounded good when negotiating with someone like the Thultyrl. Ivy stared at Sanval. He gave her that straight-ahead, honest gaze that went with the square chin and rigidly straight helmet (she wondered if it had stayed straight during his fall, or if he had shifted the helmet back into its perfect alignment the first chance he got). Still, the level, honest stare was better than that nobleman's down-the-nose look that he wore sometimes when she was being truly obnoxious. Ivy chose to interpret this as meaning he would not openly disagree with her orders—after all, it was her company, not his.
"Thank all the gods little and small, or heavy and tall, that Procampur is too polite to fight," she hummed under her breath. It was another one of the camp songs, a ditty that the mercenaries favored as an explanation as to why Procampur's soldiers rarely got into the kind of camp squabbles that kept life in the mercenary section so interesting on a daily basis.
The Procampur gentleman acted as though he had not heard her and mused in his usual mild tone, "Fighting by candlelight or lamplight poses some interesting challenges."
"We will have no need of swords," Ivy said. "There is probably nothing down here but mud and a few rats." Or at least she hoped that was the case. They had a job to do, and one of the worst parts of tunneling under other people's walls was the nasty little surprises that you found underground. There were days when Ivy could swear that there was more wildlife below the earth than above it.
Mumchance muscled between the two of them.
"So now where?" said the dwarf. "If it would please you, Captain"—and his emphasis on the title was as dry as his beard was dripping wet—"to make up your mind while our boots are
still out of the water." Like all the Siegebreakers, Mumchance took Ivy's title for what it was—a sham meant to fool other people—but he generally listened to her orders before criticizing. "Humans are never half as clever with their hands as the silliest dwarf child," Mumchance once told her. "But your race is good at the obvious when it comes to survival. Given half a chance, you can wiggle your way out of a bad situation faster than a rat can gnaw through cheese."
"River isn't over our heads yet," said Ivy, "but we're still all soaked and freezing. I want to be dry and I want to be warm before I start any march out of here. Can't use Gunderal's potions. How about that ring of yours, Zuzzara?"
The half-ore held up her bare hand, displaying a heavy gold ring with a crystal set within the band. "There's only one spell left." She sneezed. "Shouldn't we save it?"
Ivy looked them over. Gunderal looked like a carving made of bone, her complexion more yellow-white than its usual pale pearl. The tip of Zuzzara's nose was turning a nice shade of purple to match the deep gray shadows under her eyes. Mumchance huddled down into the collar of his armor like an old turtle trying to disappear into his shell, while Wiggles shivered at his feet, a miserable bundle of soggy fur. Only Sanval and Kid weren't shivering. In Kid's case, the heat of his ruddy skin was causing the water to literally steam off with a smell like wet goat and sulfur combined. Sanval, of course, stood like a carved post, apparently oblivious to the water dripping off his shiny helmet, streaming across his bright breastplate, and pooling around his well-polished bootheels.
"We need to be dry," said Ivy. "If only to get rid of that stink that Kid is giving off." With a little pointed grin, Kid clattered his hooves and flapped his arms to encourage the cloud around him to drift over the others. Zuzzara sneezed again.
"Zuzzara should save that spell, especially since I can't do
anything," argued Gunderal, but she shivered as soon as she spoke. "We may need her ring later."
Zuzzara shook her head. With a worried glance at Gunderal, she replied, "No, we'd better use it now. Your magic will come back quick enough." The half-ore twisted the ring around on her finger and muttered the words needed to set off the spell.
The spell smelled like roses and felt like a desert wind, a long warm breath that blew across them. Heat, dry heat, surrounded them. The whole group was caught in a mini-tornado of hot, whirling air.
The warmth of the spell slid right down into Ivy's bones. She sighed with pleasure. Dry and warm was the best feeling in the world, Ivy decided. And the cleaning that went with the spell was rather nice too. At least one or two layers of grime had disappeared from her armor, not that magic could ever give it a polish to compare with Sanval's breastplate.
The rest of the group looked as happy as Ivy felt. Kid's curls tightened around his horns, Gunderal looked more pink than white, Zuzzara stopped sneezing, Sanval's armor practically dazzled the eye in the lamplight, and even Mumchance's scanty beard had curled back up around his chin, instead of dripping down his chest. Wiggles danced on her back legs, obviously delighted to be a white fluffy dog again instead of resembling a drowned white rat.
"Love that spell," Ivy said to Zuzzara.
"Good," said Zuzzara, "you can pay to recharge the ring next time. You know how much fire and air spells mixed together cost?"
"What was that?" asked Sanval, holding up one arm to examine with bemusement the regained brilliance of his armor.
"Couple of spells, combined, and caught in the gem,"
f
f explained Gunderal. "One spell dispels the water and dries you
* off. Another warms you up. And your clothes are cleaned in
* the process." She gazed with satisfaction at her silk skirts, once ¦ again swirling like flower petals around her dainty ankles.
i: "You only stay warm for a bit," said Zuzzara, "but you stay >'¦ dry until you fall into another river or snow bank. Gunderal thought it up for a winter campaign."
"It was the most horrible, miserable time of my life," murmured the wizard with an exaggerated shudder. "I was not just wet and cold all the time. My clothes were muddy and stayed dirty. There was no place to take a hot bath or clean your things."
> "That wasn't so bad." Ivy shrugged. "But having your feet i wet and cold all day and all night is never fun."
"So I thought of a way that we could combine a few spells to clean us all up," said Gunderal with a shake of her head at Ivy's usual dismissal of the importance of baths. "But since I can't cast fire spells, we have to hire someone else to cast them and store them in the ring. Of course, I can't wear the ring either. Something about the fire spell turns my finger bright red!"
"So I wear the ring," explained Zuzzara.
" 'Dry Boots' is what we ended up calling that combination of spells. Although the wizard who charged the ring used fancier words," recalled Ivy.
"Dry Boots is what it is. Dry boots is what it does," said Zuzzara. "Wizards can be too fancy at times."
"Not me," whispered Gunderal. She was still pale from the pain of having her arm strapped, but she used the fingers of her good hand to twist her curls back into their perfect, blue-black ringlets. Her potions were smashed, but her enameled hairpins and shell combs had survived the fall. She made two more twists of her hair, achieving a fetching topknot. "I just like to be warm, and clean, and well dressed."
"An excellent preference," Sanval agreed with a nod of approval at Gunderal. Ivy sighed and shook her head at the pair's mad obsession with cleanliness.
"Zuzzara was talking about magic," said Mumchance with a roll of his good eye at Gunderal's grooming. "And even you, lovely Gunderal, can get carried away. You can't just make it rain. When you call the rain, it has to rain with black clouds and lightning strikes, and a cold wind rising up from the earth. Has to rain until it floods, and we're all floating away on the barn roof."
"Just that one time," said Zuzzara, stepping in front of Gunderal. She might fuss at Gunderal all day and night, but she always defended her when others did the same thing. "Don't be so hard on her."
Ivy let them chatter when they should have been moving because she knew the wizard needed time to regain some strength. But the delay still worried her. The water was definitely lapping over the edge of the riverbank.
"All I'm saying..." said Mumchance.
"Is that we had a magnificent rainmaking business until we had too much rain. You humans and demi-humans never learn to control your magic—not like dwarves," said Ivy and Zuzzara and Kid all together. Gunderal giggled, a faint (lush of color coming back to her cheeks. Mumchance rolled his eyes.
"It's an old argument," said Ivy, "and it never quite goes away." Zuzzara snorted.
"Well, Gunderal, my lovely wizard," said Mumchance, "you've done even better this time. The river is rising, Ivy."
"I know, I know," said Ivy, "and it's my fault, not Gunderal's, that we're sitting so low underground. If Gunderal feels well enough to move now, we need to find a way out. Mumchance? Kid?"
The dwarf nodded at Kid, who nodded back. The dwarfs
sense of direction underground was superb, but Kid came a i close second. Sanval started to say something, but Ivy laid a finger against her lips. Silence was needed now.
The dwarf closed his eye and cocked his head. He stomped his feet a bit, his boot heels ringing on the ground; and Kid stomped back, making the high sharp clicks of hooves against stone. Kid's ears swiveled under his glossy curls, forward, back, and then flat to his head. Mumchance nodded left and then nodded right, and clucked his tongue. Kid whistled. The two opened their eyes at the same time and turned in the same direction.
"That way," said Mumchance pointing off to the right. "There's a tunnel entrance down there."
"Maybe two, my dear," said Kid, sniffing the air. "Big hole and little hole, running close together."
Ivy nodded. Underground, Mumchance had the best sense of direction, but Kid often surprised them with his unerring instinct for the safest route or the quickest way to the surface.
Zuzzara bent down to pick up Gunderal. "I can walk," whispered the wizard. "It's not my legs that are broken."
"What if you faint again?"
"Don't argue," said Ivy, "or argue later. We need to move." Even with her human eyes, she could see the water was higher now, almost to the lip of the ledge where they rested. "No more Dry Boots, remember?"
Gunderal made a face and stood up, following the others away from the river water. Although she was descended from the water genasi on her mother's side and could, with a simple spell, breathe perfectly well underwater, she was not dressed for swimming and was rather relieved that nobody had asked her to try to find a way out through the river. Normally, when Gunderal went swimming, she had a special, magical scaled outfit to wear—one that looked stunning both wet and dry.
The Siegebreakers felt along the ledge, walking cautiously in the direction that the dwarf had indicated.
Unlike the ledge, which appeared to have been made by men or dwarves, and was part of some ancient canal running into one of the earlier incarnations of Tsurlagol, the new tunnel appeared to have been dug out by some huge animal. Letting Kid lead, Ivy gestured for the others to follow. They fell into their usual pattern for a cramped space, a single file line. Kid clicked away first, Mumchance following with the lantern, and then Gunderal behind him. Ivy swung into her usual place behind Gunderal and felt uneasy. She glanced back to encounter Sanval's cool gaze rather than Zuzzara's "hurry up" stare. Zuzzara's bulk loomed behind Sanval. It was the usual order, but with one added. At her back was someone unknown. Would he know the right way to duck if she needed to swing in a cramped space? She would never hit Zuzzara by accident in a fight; the half-ore was used to Ivy, and Ivy was used to her. They knew which way the other would move. Ivy hoped that Sanval could stay out of the way in a fight. She suspected that cutting off one or two of Sanval's limbs might not help her win payment from the Thultyrl.
More importantly, now that she was not in immediate danger of drowning or freezing to death, Ivy considered the Thultyrl's request. They had to be reasonably close to the city walls, and that meant they still could undercut the foundation. They had water, lots of water, running swiftly behind them. They had magic. Well, they would have magic if Gunderal could ignore the pain of a possibly broken arm and call up a spell or two. In all probability, they could still collapse the southwest corner of Tsurlagol's walls in time. And that meant they could collect their payment. Maybe even pad the bill a little for additional hardship—after all, they would
need to pay some wizard to create a new Dry Boots ring, and then there were all those potions that Gunderal had lost. Most likely, the potions could be added under miscellaneous expenses. That sounded fair to Ivy.
Things were not so bad, Ivy thought, but she was too wary to say it out loud. Luck had a way of turning on you, she had found, especially when you believed the worst was over.
Chapter Four
The tunnel branch smelled bad—like something had dragged carrion through it. It was a tight squeeze for Zuzzara. The half-ore bent low, pulled in her shoulders, and used her shovel to dig herself a wider opening at one point. Mumchance kept muttering at them to hurry, that he could smell the water rising behind them.
"Move then." Ivy pitched her voice loud enough for the dwarf to hear her. "Get those short legs stepping." A sharp bark sounded from Mumchance's pocket. "And stifle that dog. You can hear her for miles."
Mumchance scratched Wiggles's head. "Don't mind her, sweetie. Don't mind the bad-tempered lady who didn't listen to us when she should have ..."
"Just march," snapped Ivy. She might not have a dwarf's keen sense of smell, but the rank odor of damp earth surrounded them, evident to even her very human nose. Years of tunneling behind Mumchance had taught her to be wary of such places. Wet earth tended to be unstable, and a collapsing wall or ceiling in this place could leave them buried forever. "Gods, grant me cremation and not burial in wet earth," muttered Ivy as she burrowed like a half-mad rabbit after the others.
Behind her, silence reigned. Sanval, true to his silver-roof dignity, had not uttered one complaint, not even when Zuzzara's digging had cascaded dirt down his back. Ivy wished the half-ore was as restrained. Louder than Wiggles's barks, a steady stream of muttering came from Zuzzara as she tried to squirm through the narrowing hole.
The tunnel angled steeply upward, and the scent in the air changed. It was no longer quite so rank, but still musty. But a big musty, like a large space, Ivy thought.
The light from Mumchance's lantern bobbed up and down and then disappeared with a sudden drop.
"Cave ahead," said Gunderal, repeating Mumchance's instructions down the line. "Small drop."
Ivy hissed that description back to Sanval and heard him tell Zuzzara.
"Good, good," the half-ore replied in a booming voice that brought down another trickle of dirt from the ceiling, "my back is aching. Just let me stand up straight, that's all I ask."
What Ivy dropped into was not a cave, but a huge hall buried completely underground. The walls were too far away to be lit by Mumchance's little lantern. Great columns rose from the floor to support a ceiling lost in the black shadows above. They looked like strong support columns, which was good; but there was no way to see the condition of the high ceiling, which was bad. The air still smelled stale, but there was an older smell, harsh beneath the damp.
"Ash," said Mumchance, stirring up a cloud with his booted foot. "Floor was burned long ago."
"Bones, too," reported Kid, skipping back into the circle of light. "Old bones, my dears, scorched skulls and blackened ribs."
"Kid, stay away from those," Ivy snapped. He ignored her, continuing to poke among the piles.
Gunderal walked up to one of the black columns and rubbed her good hand across it. She left a white streak shining in the lamplight. "Soot," she said, displaying the black marks on the ends of her delicate fingers. She frowned at the mess on her fingers and pulled a lace handkerchief out of her pocket to clean off the grime. "A fire storm inside. It smells like magic, Ivy."
"How long ago? Is it gone now?" Ivy wondered if it could be a lingering spell or curse, something that could collapse the place on top of them if they touched some forbidden object.
Gunderal whispered a few words and tilted her head and gave the slightest of sniffs, as if she were trying to smell a faded perfume in a room long abandoned. "Before we were born— before our mothers or our grandmothers," she said, shrugging and wincing as the gesture pulled at her arm sling.
"Speak for your own grandparents," said Mumchance. "Mine probably carved these pillars. Look at the fluting on the base, Ivy, that's good clean stonework. Dwarves carved that; humans wouldn't have the patience for it."
"Men can build and carve well, if they desire it," said Sanval, coming up to them with a solid rap of hard boot heels against stone. Ivy thought about pointing out that his firm tread was stirring up more ash, which was settling back down on his beautifully polished boots. But she decided not to comment, not until his boots looked exceptionally bad.
"There were great temples and palaces in Tsurlagol once, before it fell," continued Sanval. "Not all were built by dwarves."
"I still say it is quality work, and that generally means dwarves," said Mumchance. "Tsurlagol was always a steady source of income for those inclined to work with humans. The city's name became another word for 'job available' among dwarves. After all, the humans needed it rebuilt so many times."
Ignoring the arguments, Ivy asked the important question. "So we're in Tsurlagol?"
"In the ruins of some earlier Tsurlagol, I think," said Sanval slowly, as if he were dredging up an old story from his memory. "This city has been destroyed and rebuilt so often, it can be hard to know one level from the next. There are tales of fire once destroying Tsurlagol, sweeping through the city. A fire begun by wizards. It burned so wildly and so free that they finally buried the city under the earth to stifle it."
"Earth magic and fire magic," said Gunderal. "I can smell traces of it in this place. But both extinguished now. And something else too, something even older. Something strange, that pulls on the Weave in a way that I do not recognize."
"So how far are we from present day Tsurlagol?" asked Ivy, whose interest in history had never been strong and tended to be even less when she was trapped underground and had missed her breakfast and had little hope of lunch.
"Outside the walls still," said Mumchance. "We've been traveling too far to the north to be under the current city. That's what I think, and I'm usually right."
"Yes, and a disgusting habit that is too," replied Ivy. She rubbed her eyes—the old ash kicked up by her passage made her itchy—and peered into the gloom. "Best way out?"
"Many ways, my dear," said Kid, trotting back and forth like a restless racehorse. "East, west, south, north. Lots of tunnels going out of here. Bigger than the way we came. Men and dwarves have been down here since this burned and been busy, busy, busy digging away. Others have come since. Animals slithering on bellies, four-foot and two-foot and no-foot, hunting behind the humans and dwarves. Old tracks overlaying older tracks, all hunting one another." Kid's tongue flickered in and out of his mouth, as if he tasted all those passages in the air itself.
"At least there are not any rats," said Zuzzara, who had a strong dislike of rodents. It was Gunderal who always had to clean out the rattraps in the barn, unless she could talk somebody else into doing it.
"Too many reptiles, my dear," said Kid, bending over to examine a small pile of bones.
"Reptiles?" said Gunderal, who had a bigger dislike of snakes than Zuzzara had of rats. Ivy could not stand either rats or snakes, and so she killed them whenever she met any. Slicing off their little heads always made her feel better.
"Snakes, lizards, something else, my dear," said Kid, still stirring through the skeletons on the floor. "But these bones are men and halflings and dwarves."
"Treasure hunters," explained Sanval. "The ruins were rumored to be laden with ancient treasures, magical artifacts, and so on. Men came, and dwarves too, and others as well, to dig through the buried cities. Tsurlagol has been many cities—each one destroyed in a siege and then rebuilt."
"And wherever the treasure hunters go, predators follow close behind," grumbled Mumchance.
Sanval nodded. "The ruins gained an evil reputation, and most of the entrances were sealed. Then Tsurlagol fell in another battle, and another."
"Until they lost track of their own ruins," Mumchance said.
"Sort of place that my mother would have loved, if it were stacked with treasure," observed Ivy. "She probably could have sung you the city's entire history right back to when the first stone was laid for the first wall. When she wasn't saving the world or singing for some king, she was the most avid treasure hunter, always going underground after some artifact or other. That was one of the things that my father could never understand. He thought all jewels and gems were just
worthless sparkly rocks compared to a nice flowering bush or a flourishing oak tree."
As they talked, they all circled slowly around the enormous hall, careful to stay within the small circle of light cast by Mumchance's lantern. Kid ventured the farthest into the dark, reaching into the shadows to feel the walls and better assess their condition.
"Your parents sound ..." Sanval hesitated. He obviously could not find a polite way to inquire about her ancestry, but he tried. "They don't seem to have been quite the same as you."
"Not hardly," said Ivy with a snort. "They were heroes. When your Thultyrl finishes his great library, you can find their exploits in a dozen story scrolls. Saved the world from incredible evil a dozen times." She always found her parents hard to explain, especially to romantic fools like Sanval who believed in honor, great deeds, and noble acts of sacrifice as much as keeping their boots shined and their armor polished. Nor would he understand that the legacy of their heroics could be a greater burden than a boon to their daughter.
Mumchance pulled Wiggles out of his pocket and dropped the dog upon the floor, letting her run loose as he continued to examine the carvings at the bases of the pillars. She pawed at one pile of ash, turning up one of the scorched skulls that Kid had mentioned. Mumchance bent down to look closer at the dog's treasure. Several teeth had been broken out of the jaw. He shooed the dog away from the bones. He never allowed any of his dogs to chew on anything that resembled people, whether it was human, dwarf, or even ore. It made for bad feelings in a mercenary camp and, he believed, was bad for the dogs' teeth.
"Something came down here and pried the gold teeth out of the jaws," he speculated as he held the skull out of Wiggles's whining reach. "This area has been pretty well looted. There's no treasure left down here. Just ash and bones."
Kid made a little grunt in agreement as he brushed away the ash covering a headless and armless skeleton. Unlike the other bones scattered nearby, this skeleton glowed an odd phosphorescent green.
"Blast," said Ivy, catching sight of the shimmering green light surrounding the bones. "Kid, I told you to leave that stuff alone."
The odd skeleton moved, a very slow tentative movement, wiggling through the ash like a worm. Kid skipped neatly out of its way, not particularly frightened but not fool enough to let the skeleton touch him.
"What is it?" asked an amazed Sanval. In Procampur, bones did not go crawling around on their own.
"Skeleton warrior or what is left of one." Gunderal sniffed. "Badly made too. It should have a head, hands, and weapons." The thing staggered upright and wobbled on unsteady feet toward them. The Siegebreakers circled out of its way. It tottered after Kid, as if it were playing some grotesque child's game of hide-and-tag.
Wiggles spotted the moving skeleton and with a joyous bark started chasing after it. The little white dog wove in and around the skeleton's ankles with little yips, obviously regarding the whole thing as one giant snack. She rose up on her hind legs, dancing like a beggar before the green glowing bones.
"Oh blast," said Ivy seeing Mumchance's frown at Wiggles's actions.
Mumchance whistled one high sharp note. With drooping tail, the dog came back to his side. "It's your fault, Ivy, that she chases after such things," scolded the dwarf.
Ivy had taught Wiggles to catch bones when she threw them to her. "Well, she started doing that little dance for bones all on her own," Ivy said, defending her earlier actions to Mumchance.
"She did not. You encouraged her to do that. And it's just not dignified!"
Ivy considered that any dog bearing the unfortunate moniker of "Wiggles" already lacked dignity, but she knew better than to say it out loud. Instead, to soothe the dwarPs feelings, she asked him if he thought the skeleton warrior could be of any use to them.
"Lead us out of here, you mean? No, those things are brainless, and this one is more so than most," observed Mumchance as he circled left to avoid the headless skeleton. "Somebody looted whatever armor and weapons these poor sods had. They just left the bones behind because they're worthless." The skeleton seemed to sense that Mumchance was talking about it, because it began its mad lurch toward the dwarf.
"Let's leave before it bumps into anyone. It looks a bit moldy under that glow," said Gunderal, pulling her skirts close with one hand to avoid any contact with the thing. "Or before it kicks up more dust!"
"Shouldn't we kill it?" asked Sanval, still eyeing the lurching green bones with an uneasy look.
"Gunderal can knock it over with a spell," declared Zuzzara. "Go on, show him."
"It's a waste of magic," answered the wizard with a small frown of her pink lips. "Why should I do anything to it?" The skeleton was now reeling back and forth, obviously both attracted and distracted by the sound of their voices.
"It is harmless," agreed Ivy. "And it is already dead."
"I think we need to go east," said Mumchance, still walking in circles to avoid the skeleton. The dwarf ducked around the columns.
"Hey," yelled Ivy, "don't leave us in the dark."
Mumchance popped around the column that Gunderal had marked earlier, holding his lantern above his head to cast the
widest possible circle of light. "Kid was right. Several ways out of here. I think we have gone west of the city, so we need to find a tunnel leading east."
"And that will lead us under the walls and then out," Ivy concurred. "Let's start moving. Come on!"
But Gunderal and Zuzzara were paying no attention to Ivy. They were still arguing about Gunderal's reluctance to cast a spell.
"I am not disanimating that skeleton," said the wizard, with the suggestion of a pout starting to form on her lower lip.
"Why not?" Zuzzara wanted to know. The half-ore's teeth were beginning to show under her upper lip—a sure sign of annoyance.
"Just because I don't feel like doing it," Gunderal replied. The headless skeleton started its weaving wander toward them.
"You always put down bones when you can. You have lost your magic!" The last was shrieked by the half-ore. The skeleton made an abrupt about-turn and lurched away from them.
"Don't be foolish! I can't lose my magic. I'm just tired, and my arm hurts, and you keep screaming at me!" Gunderal stamped her foot, raising up a cloud of ash. "Look what you made me do. It will take me forever to clean these skirts."
"You're still in pain. I told you that I should carry you out of those tunnels. You have exhausted yourself," said Zuzzara, modulating her voice into something less than an ore shout but still loud enough to make everyone else in the room wince. The skeleton picked up speed away from the half-ore, lurching rapidly toward the nearest tunnel entrance. Ivy watched it go with a mild expression of envy. Once Zuzzara and Gunderal got to the screaming stage, it was difficult to shut their mouths with anything less than an avalanche.
"I'm not a child," Gunderal answered back, her voice going higher, like a stubborn little girl. "Besides, that tunnel was so narrow, you could barely get yourself through it."
"But you're all white and dizzy."
"Because I'm wasting breath arguing with you. Leave it be, Zuzzara, I'm fine. The arm just aches. I'm not going to die from a sprained arm."
"So why can't you do any spells? You can always do spells."
"Not when I'm in pain and somebody is shouting in my ear!"
The skeleton was just a faint green glow, disappearing into the black tunnel.
"Shut up!" shouted Ivy, cutting across their words with a parade ground bellow. "They can hear you all the way back to the Thultyrl's tent. Zuzzara, if Gunderal faints or even starts to faint, sling her over your shoulder. Until then, leave her be!"
"Sorry, Ivy," muttered Zuzzara.
"Sorry, Ivy," echoed Gunderal.
Ivy shook her head at them, a little startled that they had actually paid attention to her. They must both be feeling exceptionally bad. "You should be sorry. Disgraceful, Zuzzara spending so much time worrying about you, Gunderal. And Gunderal, you should stand up to her more. Just because you're such a shrimp ..."
Gunderal squealed an indignant reply. Zuzzara frowned at Ivy. "She's not a shrimp. That's not a nice thing to say, Ivy. She can't help being short."
"I am not short!" yelled Gunderal. "I'm just not oversized!"
"Yes, yes," said Zuzzara, patting Gunderal on her head. "Zuzzara!" Gunderal ducked out of reach of the half-ore's friendly pats and checked her topknot with her good hand to
make sure that it was still straight. Her hair had slid a little to the side. Gunderal pulled a small round silver mirror out of her pouch with a sigh. The mirror, unlike her potions, had survived the fall. She handed it to Zuzzara with a sharp command of "make yourself useful, hold this for me."
Ivy rolled her eyes. The world could be ending and Gunderal would still be combing her curls or arguing with Zuzzara. "Never, ever, go campaigning with a pair of sisters," Ivy said to Sanval. "Just because they are related, they will drive each other crazy as well as everyone else around them."
"They are sisters?" He nodded toward them, his eyes wide. The half-ore, with her gray-streaked braids caught in iron beads, her sharp-toothed grin, and her large-boned frame, towered above the delicate Gunderal, with her fine features, rose petal skin, violet eyes, and a cloud of blue-black hair sliding out of its enameled pins and shell combs. Ivy could see why he had not caught the family resemblance.
There were never two women more physically different than Gunderal and Zuzzara, and most of the mercenaries in the camp never even guessed that they were half-sisters— unless they came flirting after Gunderal only to meet the point of Zuzzara's sword. Or picked a fight with the half-ore and suddenly found themselves entangled in one of Gunderal's spells.
After a decade of living with them, Ivy sometimes forgot about the physical differences. It was something about the tone of their voices, the quickness in which they could dissolve each other into tears or laughter, or the way that they would both nag her simultaneously. She had a hard time seeing them as anything but sisters.
"How can they be so different and still be sisters?" Sanval asked.
Ivy shook her head at the Procampur's stodginess. "Same human father, very different mothers," she said.
"They each take after the maternal side of their family. Look, we don't have time to discuss their family history, because it is extraordinarily complicated. Ask Mumchance some time; he knew their father." To everyone else, she shouted, "Let's get moving!"
"Ivy, I hear something," Mumchance said. "Listen. Something is coming. From there."
The dwarf pointed toward the far side of the huge hall in the direction they would have to travel. Ivy shifted her sword off her back, clipping the scabbard on to the side of her weapons belt, so it would be easier to draw. She saw that Sanval already had his blade out. It, of course, gleamed in the light of Mumchance's lantern.
Kid pricked up his pointed little ears, swiveling them in the direction that Mumchance was pointing. "Feet. Many little feet." Kid licked his lips with his purple tongue. "Many little scaly reptile feet running toward us."
Chapter Five
Zuzzara pushed her sister behind her, then stood with her shovel raised over her head, obviously listening. She peered through the darkness in the direction that Kid had pointed out. "He's right, Ivy," she said. "Something is coming—something small and fast!"
Mumchance tapped the remaining hammer in his tool belt to be sure it was in easy reach, then lifted his lantern higher, to light the hall to its fullest extent. Ivy hissed to the dwarf, "Your sword, don't forget your sword." She did not have to remind Sanval or Kid about the importance of edged weapons. Sanval shifted to a position closer to the front, facing where Mumchance had pointed earlier. Two slender stilettos appeared in Kid's hands. In a few moments, even the humans could hear the sounds of hard, scaled little feet pattering quickly toward them.
"Kobolds," groaned Mumchance, a dwarf with far too many centuries of memories of the little lizardfolk that plagued the underground routes of the world. "Those rotten little pests."
Kobolds burst through two entrances, attracted by the noise that Zuzzara and Gunderal had been making earlier. A few carried glowing green bones to light their way. Others
were bearing flaming torches. Still more were heavily armed with pointed sticks, wooden dubs, and looted weapons. They flowed like a river through the cave—a tumbling, angry river of small, scaly brown creatures. From their horned heads and reptilian snouts to their nasty ratlike tails and long-clawed toes, they shook with the fury of their barking. The Siegebreakers could barely hear one another's warning shouts over the racket.
Ivy realized that their ragged line formation was about to be overrun. She bellowed, "Tight in! Tight in! Form a knot!" Sanval and Zuzzara shifted closer to her, forming the classic square position taught by military tacticians from Tethyr to Narfell. The smaller members of the party gathered close behind them, to be better shielded from the onslaught. Of course, long shields were normally used in this tactic. Any shield would have helped, but none of them had bothered to carry campaign shields to a tunnel dig. Ivy saw Sanval shift his left arm to the classic shield lock position, grimace when he realized that he was presenting just his forearm and elbow armor to the kobolds, and then use that same armored elbow to deliver a devastating blow to a kobolds vulnerable throat.
"Back-to-back?" asked Sanval. It was another classic, especially if fighters lacked shields.
"Too many," said Zuzzara, her half-ore vision allowing her to quickly assess the size of the threat about to overrun them.
The kobolds swirled out toward the walls of the pillared great hall, then rushed inward, under and over one another. They wore ragged clothing and bits of stolen armor— armbands from humans now wrapped around kobold thighs, a human-sized elbow guard used as a knee guard—and they waved their spears above their heads. It was hard for human sight to separate them; they looked like one big scaly mass of prickly arms and knobby legs. Ivy found that when she swung
her sword at the kobolds, she was apt to bring it down on a sudden gap between them and then lift it with several kobolds clinging to the blade. They flew upward from her raised thrust, flying over one another and slamming into Ivy's head and shoulders on the way down.
Ivy stumbled and dropped to one knee. The kobolds swept over her in a ceiling of lizard underbellies, tattered shirts, and flashing red eyes. With a death grip on her sword's hilt, Ivy pushed herself upright, jabbing with her elbows and kicking out with her boot heels. The kobolds scrabbled to cling to her. She reached out with her free hand and grabbed a kobold by his ragged collar, swung him around to gain momentum, then tossed him back against the others. That created a momentary gap in the mass of bodies and gave her room to settle into a fighting stance. Once she regained her balance, she pivoted rapidly, her sword circling in a wide arc. The flat of its blade smacked into scaly bodies, clearing her path.
Another mass of kobold fighters flew toward her. She beat them back with her sword.
Sanval fought as Ivy had expected he would—with the absolutely correct posture of a man who had been trained by the very best tutors and then practiced every day as they recommended. The swift strokes of his sword cleaved a clear path through the kobolds. Unlike Zuzzara, Mumchance, or—it must be admitted—herself, Sanval did not scream or yell or curse as the little scaly pests swarmed around them. He just moved in perfect time with Ivy's attacks—backing up a step when she backed up, lunging forward with her when she lunged, his dagger in one hand, his sword in the other, in a perfect fighting stance. The kobolds tried to take advantage of his upright position, ducking beneath his weapons and wrapping their arms around his leather boots. They scratched and clung and tried to climb, curling their fingers around his belt
to pull themselves up. He raised his arm, tapped his dagger on the top of his helmet to straighten it, then dropped into a lower position—all the better to hit vulnerable parts of the kobold anatomy with his shining sword and dagger.
The creatures parted before him, obviously intimidated by the fighter in brilliant armor. Sanval just smiled and dived after them. He seemed much happier now that he was confronting living things. He had lost the consternation evident during the earlier encounter with the glowing skeleton, but he did pause to say over his shoulder, very politely, "Is it acceptable to kill these creatures?"
"Not even their mother will miss them!" yelled Ivy, slicing a hand off a kobold that was making a grab for Sanval's brightly polished elbow guard.
The beast fell down with a gurgle of blood gushing over its companions. The other kobolds seemed distracted, obviously trying to decide between looting their injured companion and attacking the warm-blooded humans before them. Two kobolds looked down at the easy prey at their feet and up again at the watrior woman with her sharp sword and stolen spear and the man in the impossibly bright armor. The half-ore was still bashing right and left with her shovel and getting nearer. The two kobolds looked at each other again and broke off from the fight, dragging their screaming former companion to a shadowy corner and snarling at anyone trying to take their prize from them.
With the kobolds distracted by the scuffle over the wounded member of their tribe, Ivy took advantage of the lull in the fight to glance over her shoulder.
Everyone was knee deep in the short reptilian fighters (except Mumchance, who was nose deep). Like Ivy, the dwarf turned in circles, to protect himself on all sides, keeping the metal lantern as high as possible to give the fighters the most
light. He kept jerking his head from side to side to see out of his one good eye.
Zuzzara—a mountain in the sea of kobolds—beat down from her height, her neat braids and big gold earrings swinging around her head, her finely tailored leather waistcoat stretched tight. The shovel became a no-nonsense club in Zuzzara's big hands, perfect for smacking heads, breaking spears in half, and sending kobolds flying.
But for every little brute that they knocked down, more appeared.
Ivy screamed at her friends to beat a strategic retreat up the nearest tunnel that was kobold free. "Knot hold, small fall back," she shouted.
Mumchance, whose responsibility in such formations was to lead the rear retreat, yelled that he had a tunnel. It was a narrow hole, only two or three kobolds wide and barely tall enough for Zuzzara to stand without bending.
Zuzzara was the last to leave the hall. She stopped in the shallow cave in front of the opening and tried to make a door of herself, closing the entry to the kobolds with her width and her slamming shovel. The majority of kobolds, still hungry, tried to rush around Zuzzara to follow them. Zuzzara gave a shout when one of the creatures trying to circle around her attempted to ram its spear into her backside. The spear caught on the long tails of the half-ore's leather waistcoat, proving Gunderal right in her argument that the style was not only fashionable but good protection too. Then Zuzzara swung around and brained the kobold with her shovel.
Ivy shoved little Gunderal in front of her as Sanval defended her back. The dainty wizard turned, obviously worried about her sister. Facing the pack of reptilian human-oids, Gunderal brought her uninjured hand up to her face and blew hard, making a high whistling noise. A blue light
streaked across a startled kobolds face, and a fine icicle suddenly appeared hanging off the end of its nose. But the creature took no harm from the spell, shaking off the ice and wading back into the attack. "Go on, go on. Zuzzara is doing fine," Ivy shouted at the obviously dismayed wizard. "Keep up with Kid."
Mumchance swung flat against the tunnel wall, letting Kid and Gunderal scamper past. A kobold snuck past him as well, and Sanval made as if to follow, but Ivy caught his arm. Kid would keep Gunderal safe. He kicked back with his hooves, catching the kobold smartly on its scaly snout and giving it a flowing bloody nose. Another kick caught the kobold lower down, right below the stomach, and the creature folded into a small ball of whimpers.
Mumchance knocked it into its fellows with a hard blow from his fist. Wiggles gave the creature a nip on the tail in passing and then bit the ankle of another kobold trying to sneak up on the dwarf.
"Good dog!" said Mumchance, pulling the remaining hammer from his belt and braining the kobold with it.
"Use your sword!" Ivy shouted at him. The dwarf always forgot his sword.
Mumchance shoved his hammer back in his broad belt and pulled out his sword, waving it wildly. A number of kobolds ended up with sliced ears and nicked toes. The dwarf delayed following Kid. He still carried the Siegebreakers' only lantern, and he knew the humans needed him to light their exit from the tunnel.
Ivy whipped around, checking behind her and cutting off a kobold sliding along the tunnel wall. She rammed her sword through the belly of the scaly attacker and grabbed its spear with her other hand. She jabbed back with the spear, just under Sanval's arm, to catch another kobold in the throat.
Mumchance's energetic, if less effective, fighting sent the beams of the lantern swinging wildly. To avoid being blinded by the sudden light shining in her eyes, Ivy glanced up. Above them, she saw that one of the old wooden beams holding up the tunnel was clearly cracked.
"Zuzzara!" yelled Ivy, and she gestured with her thumb at the beam. The big half-ore glanced in the direction of the beam and then swept her shovel through the kobolds as though she were sweeping dust out the door. The creatures squealed as they went rolling down the tunnel.
"See it!" shouted Zuzzara.
"Come on, Procampur," Ivy said, dropping the kobold spear that she still clutched and grabbing Sanval's shiny steel-clad shoulder. She shoved him in front of her, almost ramming his nose into the side of the tunnel as she swung him around. "Time to run!"
"Your friend—" Sanval sounded a little muffled as he tried to keep his face out of the dirt wall in front of him.
"Can take care of herself," interrupted Ivy. "Follow the dwarf and stop fighting the kobolds. Zuzzara will get them!"
Falling farther behind her fleeing friends, the half-ore continued bowling kobolds into their kin using her shovel. The kobolds retreated, a bit intimidated by the tall, screaming half-ore woman with pointed teeth who was swinging an iron-headed shovel.
Zuzzara waded right into the group of kobolds. Now she swung the shovel like a scythe, a long, low sweeping motion that mowed through them. The little brown creatures ricocheted off the shovel's flat end, bouncing head over tail onto their fellows. Thunk, whack, thunk. The shovel rang against their scaly hides and horned heads. The kobolds leader—a little taller and greener than the rest of the crew—barked something high and sharp that sounded like Draconic commands, and his
guards lowered their spears and tried to overrun Zuzzara. Most of the spear points simply bounced off her thigh guards and her wide leather belt with its big brass buckle. She was far too tall for the kobolds to reach any vulnerable points.
"Come on," said Ivy, still propelling the rest of the group in front of her. "Run!"
Once again, Sanval swung around Ivy, obviously intent on backtracking down the tunnel to join Zuzzara. Ivy grabbed him by his sword arm, disregarding the danger of being skewered by his blade, and pulled him completely around by shifting her weight and digging her feet in.
"We must help her. What are you doing?" yelled the captain.
"No. Keep going," Ivy shouted the order, and the tone got through to him. He blinked in confusion at her. "She'll bring the ceiling down. She knows what she's doing. Run, you idiot hero, run!"
Zuzzara flipped another kobold off the end of her shovel and plunged the blade straight up, catching it against the timber holding up that section of the ceiling. The half-ore bulged her muscles as she levered the shovel against the cracked beam. One brass button pinged off her waistcoat, and the kobold leader screamed as he caught it squarely in the eye.
The crack widened, and dirt rained down upon the squeaking kobolds. They raced away from the terrible giant who had wreaked such destruction upon them. With a loud splintering sound, the beam split in two. The beam's loose end bounced upon the head of the kobold's leader, cracking his skull.
Zuzzara spun around and raced back to her group, scooping up Sanval and Ivy as she ran. She tucked one under each arm, as if they were small children. Her shovel crashed against Ivy's knees as she tightened her grip around Ivy's waist. Ivy
hoped that her armor would hold and tried not to think about breathing. "Let's go," Zuzzara cried.
With a crash, the rest of the ceiling collapsed, sending clouds of dirt through the tunnel. Coughing, choking, and with streaming eyes, the group stumbled out into a large, hollow space. Zuzzara gently set Sanval and Ivy down.
"Thank you, Zuzzara," said Ivy, once she had spat some of the dust out of her throat.
The gentleman from Procampur lowered his head in a quick bow toward the half-ore. "I also thank you, Lady Zuzzara, but I am sorry that I was not allowed to aid in your defense."
"Sanval, there was no need to play the hero. Zuzzara can take care of herself. Take care of the rest of us too," Ivy said, once she had figured out that he was courteously criticizing her order to retreat.
"But the thought was sweet," said Zuzzara, smiling wide enough to show off her long white canines.
"Maybe we all need a short rest," Ivy said and sat down on the ground with her legs straight out in front of her, her hands on knees, and her back bent. She tried not to gasp too loudly as she endeavored to catch her breath.
Sanval stood beside her, but from somewhere under his armor, he had retrieved a cloth and, to no one's surprise, began polishing his sword. "What are your plans now, Captain?"
Ivy looked up at him, trying not to look too discomposed. She was fairly certain that there were still bits of kobold stuck to parts of her gear. She pulled off her gauntlets and shoved them through her belt. "We will bring the western wall down for your Thultyrl, just as we discussed. This is just a little detour; but we will end up under the wall, and do a little strategic digging with Zuzzara's shovel. Let the river do its work. And then, plop goes the wall. We just need to be out of the way when the whole thing topples down."
"At least today is still better than that time with the hogs," muttered Zuzzara.
"Oh, definitely better than the hogs," Gunderal agreed. The litde wizard motioned Zuzzara to sit down and immediately began readjusting her sister's braids—a good sign that their latest spat was over.
"Hogs?" Sanval said, watching them with a puzzled frown. Ivy wasn't sure if he were confused by the reference to pork or still trying to figure out how the pair could be sisters.
"If we had had more time to work on the fuse and to pack those pigs correctly, we would never have had any problem," said Mumchance.
"What pigs?" said Sanval glancing at the dwarf. So it was definitely the pork that had aroused Sanval's curiosity. Ivy stifled a grin at this evidence of his humanity. Only dead men could keep silent around her friends, once they started one of their rambling tales; and, as she suddenly recalled, even that lich had not been able to resist joining in the conversation once. Oh, that had been a strange campaign!
As usual, each of the Siegebreakers began talking as fast as they could, trying to beat one another to the end of the pig story.
"Dead hogs, actually," said Mumchance and was immediately interrupted by Zuzzara.
"Very dead hogs," said the half-ore, who had complained unceasingly during that campaign that she had to carry most of the pigs.
"Absolutely rotten hogs. Bloating," added Gunderal, blowing her cheeks out to illustrate. Anyone else who did that would have looked hideous, but Gunderal just appeared even lovelier, if slightly fishlike, with her bloated cheeks.
Sanval looked baffled, and then enlightenment dawned. At that point, he looked mildly nauseated.
"Exactly," said Ivy with a chuckle, getting into the conversational game. "We packed a bunch of these dead hogs under a tower."
"The smell was awful," shuddered Gunderal, who had stayed as far away from the dead pigs as she could and kept a perfumed handkerchief over her nose whenever she could not maintain her distance.
"Then we lit a fire under them, dear sir," said Kid, who was wandering in and out of the group as he usually did, too restless to sit still for more than a moment.
"Nice long fuse, right into dry tinder packed under the hogs," said Mumchance. "Only it burned a little faster than we expected."
"And the tunnel that we were in was a disused part of the dungeons," explained Ivy. "Typical place. Scraps of this and that, stacks of dried-out bones from old prisoners, old spell books that the wizard who owned the place had tossed away."
"Everything caught on fire," said Gunderal. "And Wiggles did warn us, Ivy, when all that smoke started pouring up the tunnel toward us."
"The dog was a hero," said Ivy with a roll of her eyes.
"But the pigs? The dead hogs?" said Sanval. Ivy liked that about the officer from Procampur—he could stick to a point. Which is more than any of her friends could do.
"The hogs did exactly what they were supposed to do," said Ivy with a grin.
"The pigs went boom!" said Zuzzara, with a lot of satisfaction, flinging her hands up in the air and giving a very orclike chuckle.
"And the tower fell down," concluded Mumchance. "Served that wizard right for trying to steal that land from those pig farmers," pronounced Ivy.
"An interesting method of destruction," Sanval said. "Why did you not try to do the same here?"
"Not enough hogs," sighed Mumchance. "What you've got, you eat. Pity. With a little refinement, more containment of the blast, it could be a very effective technique. But there is water here, so we decided to use that instead."
"At least three underground rivers in the area. I just joined them together to form one large river," explained Gunderal. "Then I sped up the current a little and persuaded that river to change course to run under the western wall. It won't last forever; eventually the rivers will split back into their true courses."
"But it should give us an enormous amount of water to wash out the foundations with. Better than pigs really," said Mumchance.
"If we are not in these tunnels when the river goes through," said Ivy and then wished she had kept her mouth shut.
"My dears," said Kid, whose wandering led him to poke his nose down another tunnel, "there is another buried building here."
"All burned out like the last one?" asked Ivy, pulling herself upright and walking over to the entrance.
"No, my dear," said Kid. "Just dusty and smelling of blood."
Chapter Six
Mumchance swung his lantern around. The tunnel opened into a room from another long-buried level of the city. Everyone moved cautiously into the dark new space, listening for the sound of kobolds barking or the patter of little skeleton feet. But only silence filled the shadows. None of them feared a fight; but, as Ivy reminded them in her fierce whispers, each battle cost them time. They needed to find a way out so they could complete their mission and collapse the wall before Enguerrand's charge.
Although they only had Mumchance's lantern to light the gloom, the ceiling was low enough that they could see a delicate mosaic of shells and blue waves.
"How pretty," said Gunderal. She loved shell patterns and had painted similar waves all around her room at the farm. Then she coughed. "What is that smell?" A sharp metallic odor surrounded them like an evil fog. "It smells like a butcher's shop," she said. "Please tell me it is very old blood."
"Fresh blood," said Kid, his nostrils quivering. "I wonder what died here?"
There were no signs of fire, just the awful smell of blood, underlaid by a moist smell of moss and mire. Wiggles whined
and then whimpered. Mumchance patted the little dog on the head, trying to quiet her, but finally scooped her out of his pocket and set her down on the tiled floor. Yipping high enough to make Ivy wonder if her ears would start bleeding, Wiggles raced away into the darkness, with Kid trotting quickly behind her.
"Come quick, come quick, my dears," cried Kid. "Here's a fresh kill."
"More kobolds?" grumbled Mumchance, swinging the lantern toward the sound of Kid's voice and Wiggles's barking.
"Bigger. Much bigger," said Kid, sounding pleased.
A freshly killed bugbear lay at Kid's feet. The bugbear's head had been chewed off, and one arm was missing. When it had walked upright and had had a head, it had been taller than Zuzzara. Scraps of black leather armor bound together with heavy chains decorated the bugbear's body, but its hairy legs were bare, and rope sandals covered the sole of each hairy foot. The stench rising from the corpse was nauseating.
"Look at that blood trail," Zuzzara said, pointing at a mixture of slime and blood that led into another dark tunnel entrance. "Something took the missing arm that way!"
"Well, they can keep it," said Ivy. "Let's see what else that he's got."
"It's a she, not a he," said Zuzzara, looking more closely at the curved leather breastplate and studded leather skirt.
"Well, whatever it is, it is dead," said Ivy, leaning down to search the body. She tried breathing through her mouth to lessen the impact of the mildewed smell. Ivy ran quick hands down the bugbear's bulky body, liberating a leather pouch tied to the creature's weapons belt. She opened it and saw with satisfaction that it held a number of cheap tallow candles, well wrapped against damp. "More lights," she said, and she tied
the pouch to her own belt. She fished out a handful of candles, shoving them at Sanval.
"There's a torch under the body too," said Mumchance, pushing at the bugbear. "Here, Zuzzara, roll it over and let's get that." Zuzzara leaned down and flipped the bugbear over.
"You are looting the dead," said Sanval. He sounded troubled and a little disgusted, and was still holding the candles in one armored hand.
"Of course," said Ivy. "Stow those candles somewhere. If you get separated from us, you'll need them." Reluctantly, Sanval tucked the candles behind his breastplate, while Ivy questioned the half-ore. "Zuzzara, what have you got?"
"Torch dropped over here, and two more fastened to its back."
"Excellent. Any food?"
"Just a water bottle, and that's almost dry," said Mumchance.
"So the bugbear came down here from the city, do you think?"
"It came with others," said Kid. "There are more tracks here, back and forth: human or two-foot at least, my dears." "Bugbears? Ores? Humans?"
"They all wear boots," said Kid. "But big. No little feet like Gunderal."
"I am not little," squeaked Gunderal. "Ivy, somebody has been casting spells in here."
"Whatever killed the bugbear?"
"No." Gunderal sounded puzzled. "It feels more like light or fire. Not my sort of spell. Complicated, arcane, sort of a seeking spell."
Sanval looked doubtful. "Can she tell that?"
Ivy nodded. "It comes from her mother's side of the family. She's got a good sense for magic. When it has been used, how
it has been used. She can usually tell if something has been warded or laid with magic traps, which is useful when you're sneaking into places that you don't know."
Gunderal sighed. "I can't tell you more than that, Ivy. But whatever it was, it happened not long ago. Not even a day. It is very strong, much stronger than that room that we just left. That was old magic. This is new."
"Wonderful," said Ivy. "That means that there is someone else down here." She passed out the candles and the torches, spreading the lights around so that Mumchance could wander off with his lantern and not leave the rest of them stranded in the dark. Zuzzara relit the bugbear's torch and held the light over the blood trail leading off toward the dark entrance of the tunnel.
"Funny marks in the dirt," she said.
"Footprints," speculated Kid. "Big four-foot with round, flat fleet."
"Hope whatever it was is off enjoying lunch," said Ivy, "and will take a little nap afterwards."
"Just so long as it doesn't wake up hungry for a snack," said Mumchance.
"Lovely thought! Anything else worth taking?" said Ivy, poking the bugbear's recumbent body with her toe.
"Nice rope," said Zuzzara, unwinding the coil of rope from the bugbear's shoulder.
"The weapons are trash," replied Mumchance with a dwarfs contempt for shoddy metalwork. "Worse than ours. The sword is blunt, and the knife has a notched blade. The scabbard's not bad—it's better work than the rest, gilt on leather and some nice stitching."
"Loot then, picked up here and there," said Ivy, knowing the signs. "Making do with what the others don't want. Fancy scabbard kept after someone else has taken the good blade."
"Fottergrim's raiders were so armored," said Sanval. "Carrion crows, picking what they can out of other's misery." Ivy wondered if he was still describing Fottergrim's troops or delivering a bit of a rebuke. She decided to take his comments as referring to the former.
"There might be more of Fottergrim's people in the ruins," he added.
"Must be more," answered Ivy. "A bugbear like this wouldn't come down on its own."
"Maybe they were countermining us," said Mumchance. "Countermining?" asked Sanval.
"Digging under where they think we are digging," Ivy explained, "to collapse our tunnel. Except we did such a very good job of collapsing it ourselves and saved them the trouble. Mumchance, they are pretty far off the line if they were looking for our tunnel. And the bugbear doesn't have any shovel or pick."
"Maybe the others took the tools with them," suggested the dwarf.
"And left the weapons and the torches?"
"No, my dears, they did not stop to take anything. When this one was killed, the others kept their distance," said Kid, who was circling back and forth, peering at the tracks on the tiled floor. "They started forward, stamp, stamp, stamp, not running, just walking, but then they stopped very quick, shuffle, shuffle back and to the side. Two of the big ones tried to turn back again, but the othet one, the one with man-sized feet, drove them away."
Silence fell on the group, as they realized what Kid meant.
"They moved out of range and let whatever it was chew on the poor bastard. Or their officer ordered them not to attempt a rescue," said Zuzzara, voicing all their thoughts. "Remind me not to fight for Fottergrim's pay, if that's the way that they treat their mercenaries."
"A wise decision,'' said Sanval with that little quirk of the lips that indicated he was amused.
"Especially since we're fighting for Procampur," emphasized Ivy with a quick kick at Zuzzara's ankles. She missed her target; Zuzzara could move fast when she chose.
"Why are they here then, Ivy?" said Gunderal to cover up her sister's mistake and Ivy's embarrassment.
"A little quick treasure hunting?" guessed Mumchance.
"In the middle of a siege?" said Ivy. "Well, it can be boring sitting on the walls waiting for someone to attack."
"Because of this," said Mumchance, who had moved from the bugbear's looted corpse. Before him gaped a black square. He swung the lantern forward to reveal an ancient city bath, with marvelous mosaic pictures covering the bottom of what was once a large pool.
With the use of Mumchance's lantern, they could make out footprints trailing through the dry and dust-filled bath. Kid jumped in the pool and began tracking the tracks, his nose almost brushing the floor.
"Here a big two-foot knelt," sang out Kid. "Here his four companions waited, jog, jog, jog from one foot to the other. They were impatient. Scared too, most certainly frighrened. They kept turning to peer behind them. Why, my dears, why?"
"They heard a noise, or thought they heard one," speculated Ivy. "They were expecting an attack. Then they came out of there and were attacked."
"Five at the bottom of the pool?" asked Sanval.
"Oh, five, definitely five," said Kid. "Five walked down here, and five went out. But only four ran away from this room."
"Leaving one dead companion behind them," said Ivy. "They were right to be nervous. Something was hunting around here."
"Then why wait for someone to look at pictures in the bottom of a dried out pool?" asked Gunderal.
"There are armor scrapes against these tiles. From where the one with man-sized feet knelt," said Kid, peering even closer. "Here's a line a little ways back. Sword, scabbard maybe, brushed the dust behind him?"
"Officer then. They had to wait for him," said Ivy, sitting down cross-legged on the edge of the bath. When Kid went tracking, he could grow a bit obsessed. From past experience, she had learned to make herself comfortable until he was done. Sanval remained standing, straight as always, shifting slightly from one foot to the other. Ivy reached up with her fist curled and rapped his armored knee. "Rest now and stand at attention later," she said.
Sanval nodded and knelt on one knee beside her to watch Kid. Well, sometimes the man displayed sense, thought Ivy.
"Look at the picture, Ivy, that's a wizard in the center of that picture," said Gunderal. "Zuzzara, can you bring the light closer?"
Zuzzara nodded and jumped down into the bath. She swung her lit torch over the pattern that Gunderal had pointed out.
The dust had been carefully swept away from the center of the bath, displaying a series of mosaic pictures. The first picture showed a wizard, with runes woven in his azure cloak, standing before a tall tower with flames sprouting from it. More flames played along the walls behind the tower, and behind the walls a hint of rooftops, also engulfed in flames. Men and women ran along the tops of the walls, arms outstretched as if pleading with the wizard to save them. A great jewel, portrayed in tiny crystal tiles, glittered in the wizard's hand.
A trail of more runes, picked out in silver and gold tiles, circled away from the picture and led to a second one. The
burning tower was leaning forward, and men fell from its crenellated top to lie on the ground before the wizard. Black lines zigzagged away from the wizard's feet and led to a final picture, which showed men carrying the supine wizard away on a bier, the gleaming gem resting on the center of his chest and portrayed as twice the size of any man's head.
"And down go the walls of Tsurlagol," said Ivy, waving a hand at the center picture. "Which siege do you suppose that was?"
"Long ago," guessed Gunderal. "Look at the runes on his cloak."
"Two or rhree generations before they built this bath, and the tile work is old to begin with," guessed Mumchance. The dwarf dropped over the rim of the bath and stalked toward the picture to examine it more closely.
"What do you mean? Why two or three?" asked Sanval.
"Takes that long for humans to turn something horrible into art," said Mumchance with all the authority of a dwarf who had already celebrated his three hundredth birthday. "Mighty big shock for the folk like me—leave a town with all the humans swearing that they will never forget this or that, come back in ninety years, and it's all a fairy tale to those humans' grandchildren. Or a decoration for their city bath. Why if half the heroes in the world were as tall as their statues ..."
"They'd all be giants," chorused Zuzzara and Gunderal. This was an old, old complaint of Mumchance, and they'd heard it almost as often as his tale of having to earn his first mining tools by shoveling away snow higher than his ears from the mountain entrances of his family's diggings.
"And dwarves don't do that?" asked Sanval, and Zuzzara and Gunderal groaned.
"You shouldn't encourage him," translated Ivy when Sanval glanced at the sisters. "Lets hope this is one of his shorter lectures."
"It takes dwarves longer to lie to themselves," admitted Mumchance, ignoring Ivy's comment. "And we don't do pretty just for pretty's sake. Well, not in pictures. Armor and jewelry—that's metalwork and another story. Elves, now, they have the longest memories. When they make a picture like this, it's to remind other folk, and they hate it when you question what's real and what's not. Everything is real to an elf."
"Some of them just have a finer sense of humor about it than others," added Ivy, who got along better with elves than the rest of the Siegebreakers. She appreciated their efforts to seek out her father in Ardecp when he disappeared during his last journey into the forest. It wasn't the elves' fault that he had not wanted to be found after her mother's death. Ivy suspected that he was probably one of the murmuring oaks shading the path there. He had always talked about the simplicity of life as a tree—trees, after all, did not have hearts that could break, or even crack a little.
"So, is this a real event or not?" asked Zuzzara, who never could stand much philosophizing and disliked talk about elves because of some bad experiences with one of her stepmothers.
"Well, it's not an elf-made picture, which makes it a bit tricky to tell," started Mumchance.
"Somebody came down here in the dust and gloom, not to mention risking kobolds and whatever chewed that bugbear, and stopped to look at it," said Ivy.
"Maybe we should discover who that person was," suggested Sanval.
"Or maybe we should look for a way out that keeps us out of their path," Ivy said loudly.
Nobody was listening to her. They were all carefully puzzling over the picture on the floor. There were times when kobolds were more sensible than her friends. At least kobolds
concentrated on the basics like finding food and left mystical patterns written in the floor tiles alone.
"I don't think that they were just looking at the pictures. I think they stopped to read the runes," added Gunderal. "Look how the dust is cleaned away so carefully."
"Can you read them?" asked Ivy, because it was obvious that nobody was going to do anything until they had solved this little mystery.
Gunderal shook her head. "Too old. Four hundred years or more, if I had to guess. And it's only a guess." She looked at Mumchance where he was bent over the runes, tracing the edges of each shape with a stubby finger.
"I'm old," snorted the dwarf. "But I'm not that old. Runes change, meanings change. But these ... These might be corruptions of old Netherese symbols."
"That is not possible," said Sanval.
"Even I know that empire was dust long before the first Tsurlagol was built," added Ivy, just to stay in the conversation.
"The empire disappeared long before Tsurlagol was built," agreed Mumchance. "But that doesn't mean all their magic disappeared overnight. Dig deep enough and you run into strange things in the Vast—artifacts, toys, bits of spellbooks that those mad sorcerers left behind. They were human, after all—that meant they bred like rabbits and ran like deer when the disaster finally overtook them."
"Mumchance," said Ivy in gentle reproof. "Both Sanval and I would like to think our race has a few redeeming qualities."
"Many and many," said the dwarf. "You humans are usually nice to dogs and other small furry creatures. But the best of all is that you know when to run to survive. Dwarves can be too stubborn sometimes." He fingered the old scars on his face and shook his head at memories of the mine fire that had
destroyed his family. He shrugged and continued the discussion of Netheril, because ancient history was always more pleasant than his own memories. "When the shining cities fell, not everyone died. Some carried mighty magic into exile. There have always been rumors about a fantastic treasure buried beneath Tsurlagol. The story goes that the first time Tsurlagol fell into dust and ruin, it was because of a great magic that men could not control. That sounds like Netheril to me. Then later they started that mad fire that they had to bury under the earth. That was fairly recent history for a dwarf, not much before my grandfather's father's time. And they used some fancy artifact to bury the city, something like what would have come out of Netheril."
"But is there information here that can help us?" said Ivy, glancing around the shadowed bath.
"The dwarf is right, my dears. These symbols are not well made, but they do bear great resemblance to those used by Netheril and its sorcerers," said Kid, circling back to peer over Mumchance's shoulder. He pursed his lips. "These are copies of copies, made by men who could only draw what they saw, but could not read."
"And how do you know that, young thief?" asked Mumchance.
"Because I had a master once," said Kid, very softly. Ivy, who had only paid mild attention to Mumchance's lecture on ancient history, was caught by Kid's depressed tone. He never spoke of his past, and this was the first time that she had heard him mention a master. "He was not a good man. But he was fond of old things, very old magic. Spellbooks with runes like these and worse."
"Worse?" asked Ivy. Kid ignored her and trotted away, his nose down to examine the footprints in the dust.
"So when fire consumed the city, they used a magic jewel to bury it," said Gunderal, still discussing the mosaic with
Mumchance, pointing at the burning walls before the cloaked wizard.
"Just one wizard with a fancy gem? Doesn't seem likely," said Ivy.
Sanval wrinkled his brow. "I was never that fond of history lessons, but I always heard that it was an earthquake sent by the gods in answer to the people's prayers."
"I doubt it was the gods. That wizard must have caused the earthquake with a spell, maybe something stored in that jewel that he is holding, like we store Dry Boots in our ring," said Gunderal, on her knees at the edge of the bath, still staring at the mosaic. "Why show a spellcaster with a gem if you don't have a gem in the tale? It must have been a wonderful spell. I told you that I could still feel echoes of weird old magic in that hall."
"Fascinating, all of it, but we are not here to go treasure hunting. In fact, if someone is looking for that magic rock, I would rather avoid them," said Ivy. "Kid, which way did they go? Our party of five less one?"
"They came from the east, my dear," said Kid, trotting to the edge of the bath and flipping himself easily to a handstand on the rim, giving a quick click of his hooves at the top of his handstand, and then somersaulting to a dark archway across the room. "And they left to the north, through that wide arch there."
"Is he always like this?" asked Sanval.
"No," said Ivy. "He's tired, or he would have done a couple of extra cartwheels. We've thought about selling him to a faire once or twice." But Kid's actions disturbed her. In more recent years, Kid only did such extravagant show-off gestures when he was in one of his black moods.
"But we've never found a faire," grunted Mumchance. "Come on, girl, give the short guy a hand up." The last was
said over his shoulder to Zuzzara, who grabbed his belt with one hand and easily lifted him over the edge. Zuzzara followed with a little hop. She wandered back over to where the bugbear lay, to pick up the extra torch left by the body.
"So we go east," Ivy decided. "That group came from Tsurlagol. I'm sure of it."
"If we go north, we will learn why they came here," said Sanval in polite disagreement, obviously deciding that now was not the time to defer to her status as Captain of the Siegebreakers.
Ivy sighed. She knew being in charge without opposition would not last that long—it never did with her friends, and why should Sanval be any different—but she was willing to try. "Do we care why they are here? They're deserters or treasure hunters or lost fools," said Ivy.
"What if they are planning an ambush?" Sanval asked.
"Well, jolly good luck to the Thultyrl, then," said Ivy, "but I'm not his bodyguard. I'm here to bring down a wall, and to do that we need to go east, not north." Sanval still looked troubled. "That sounded a bit crude. Most assuredly, we wish the Thultyrl a long life and much happiness," Ivy added.
"Until we get paid," muttered Mumchance and winced when Ivy's elbow connected with his ear.
Zuzzara gave a shout. She'd been poking around the bugbear's body, muttering about the smell of moss getting stronger. Suddenly, the half-ore yelped with pain. She spun around, flailing at the air. "Something is here," she screamed. "It bit me!"
Chapter Seven
Zuzzara stumbled back toward them, one leg angled oddly out in the air, shouting that she could not shake her attacker off her leg. The only problem was that nobody could see anything. Gunderal told Zuzzara to stop playing stupid jokes. Zuzzara screamed, "Half-ores never play practical jokes!" She slammed her shovel down on the space near her leg. The shovel hit something with a sickening thud. The smell of rotting mushrooms filled the room. Zuzzara and her invisible attacker tumbled into the empty bath.
"Look at that!" said Mumchance, pointing at the dusty tiles of the bath.
The group could clearly see the signs of four big round feet being dragged after Zuzzara as the half-ore stumbled in circles and continued to beat down with her shovel. Each stroke of the shovel thwacked into something solid that stopped it at the level of Zuzzara's knee. Each stroke also released more fungal stench into the air, so that even Kid was choking a little and covering his nose with one ruddy hand. But Zuzzara's efforts seemed to have no effect on her attacker.
Ivy and Sanval leaped into the bath. Both swung their swords at the same time, cutting through the air near Zuzzara.
Ivy felt her blade hit something solid and sticky. When she pulled back on the stroke, she could see a gelatinous shimmer drip down her blade.
Closer to Zuzzara, the stench was overpowering and reminiscent of the strange mossy smell that had clung to the dead bugbear's corpse. Ivy gagged and staggered back. She concentrated on breathing through her mouth and sawing away at whatever was attacking Zuzzara.
Kid's two stilettos went whistling past Ivy, and thankfully missed Zuzzara. One struck and seemed to stick in whatever was attached to the half-ore's leg. The little stiletto bobbing in the air gave them another reference point for their attacks.
Beside Ivy, Sanval swallowed grimly against the stink and slashed at the invisible creature. Like Ivy, he had trouble with his sword sticking in whatever he struck. His blade was almost wrenched out of his hand, and he overbalanced, dragged to one knee as he wrested the sword free. Sanval rolled to one side to avoid Ivy's next awkward stroke and jumped straight into the air. As he launched himself forward, he brought his blade point down with a two-handed stroke into the space nearest to Zuzzara's ankle, trying to skewer whatever was attacking her. He missed. The sword buried itself into the mosaic floor with a sickening thud. Even Mumchance winced as the big fighter's shoulders and arms took the shock of the misdirected stroke. Sanval simply grimaced, pulled his sword free, and immediately swung around to assault the invisible foe again.
Zuzzara's attacker dtagged her in a circle. She was pivoting on her right leg with her left leg almost straight out in the air. Ivy danced around her, trying to figure out from the angle of Zuzzara's leg where her attacker was. She slashed down just as Zuzzara pivoted farther right. Ivy stopped the stroke in midair, nearly knocking herself off balance, but she managed to avoid slicing into Zuzzara's knee.
"Watch her leg! Watch her leg!" screamed Gunderal, as both Ivy and Sanval continued to swing their swords blindly at the area near her sister's left boot. "Be careful!"
"Get it off me," cried Zuzzara, the leather in her boot now starting to visibly shred around the calf. "Gunderal, do something! It's magic!"
With an elegant swirl of silk skirts, Gunderal leaped into the bath. She landed gracefully but with a wince of pain as the movement jarred her sprained arm. With her uninjured hand, Gunderal fumbled loose the canteen at her belt, worked its cap open, and tucked it into her sling. She sprinkled drops of water into her good hand. Her canteen slipped out of the sling and fell onto the floor a thud. Stepping over the canteen, Gunderal muttered the words of a spell as she walked toward her half-sister.
"Get back!" screamed Zuzzara, terrified Gunderal would walk into the blades of the fighters or fall victim to whatever was trying to chew off her leg.
Gunderal ignored her. She continued to chant, cupping her hand in front of her face, and blowing out her breath.
Gunderal's breath sparkled in the air, glittering like crystals. A frost formed on the invisible creature revealing four stumpy legs and a square body, with a cluster of round nodules covering its sides.
Now able to see the creature, Ivy and Sanval hit it on each side with their swords.
"Go for the head, go for the head," cried Gunderal. . "Where is the head?" screamed Ivy.
"Where it is attached to my boot!" yelled back Zuzzara, giving a mighty kick. The creature hung on. Sanval swiftly spun and sliced away the cluster of nodules on the top of the creature's head, barely missing Zuzzara's foot. The creature gave off an even more noxious puff of stink and collapsed.
A mottled green and brown hide became visible underneath the glittering frost that coated it. Although it was not easy to tell head from tail, what appeared to be the attacker's mouth remained locked around the calf of the half-ore's boot.
Using Zuzzara's shovel as a crowbar, Sanval broke open the creature's jaw and released Zuzzara's leg.
Gunderal observed with satisfaction that the creature had not been able to completely bite through Zuzzara's double-dragonhide boots. "I told her that the expense was worth it," she explained to Sanval, who was still looking a little dazed from the stench of the creature. "Besides looking fantastic, those boots can survive the worst attack. It never pays to wear cheap footwear."
"Certainly," Sanval replied courteously. He flicked out a clean cloth from his belt pouch to wipe disemboweled fungus off his sword and the front of his own fine leather boots.
"But look at that tear," said Zuzzara, leaning down to finger the long rent in the top layer of leather.
"We will just take them back and get them exchanged for a new pair. Probably something in green, that would be nice."
"Do you think that cobbler will do that?"
"He gave us a lifetime guarantee," said Gunderal with the assurance of a wizard who was always willing to make merchants live up to their promises.
Ivy poked the creature with the tip of her sword, just to verify that it was dead. It let out another puff of stink.
"Ivy, leave it alone," said Gunderal, pulling up one of her long silk neck scarves to cover her nose.
"Poor baby," said Mumchance, looking down at the four-legged creature. He snapped at Wiggles. "Don't touch. Don't roll in it! Bad dog! Wiggles, stay!" He lunged for the little white dog and scooped Wiggles up into his pocket before she could roll over the corpse.
"Poor baby!" said Zuzzara. "It nearly chewed my leg off."
"Oh, stop making a fuss," said her unsympathetic sister. "I told you that we can get you new boots."
"What is it?" said Ivy. "Besides smelly."
"Phantom fungus—you get them in old tunnels and caves. It's a little one though. Full grown, it would have been chewing off Zuzzara's hip, not biting her ankles," said Mumchance. "Good thing you used that frost spell, Gunderal. It is the only thing that could have made it visible. Their invisibility talent is immune to most magical counterspells."
"It should have frozen in place," said Gunderal. She sighed from deep in her chest and shook her head. "Not just spatkled."
"Hey," said Zuzzara, "last time that you did that freeze spell, you turned me into a snow ore. That spell can sting!"
"The spell did not work anyway," said Gunderal, ignoring her sister's criticisms as she usually did. "I just can't seem to concentrate long enough."
"The frost was fine," consoled Ivy, "all we needed to do was see it to kill it."
"It was an excellent use of magic," agreed Sanval with a slight bow. "In Procampur, we say that subtlety always takes more talent than brutality."
"Oh, do we say that?" said Ivy, remembering some of her wilder strokes as she tried to bash Zuzzara's attacker. "How very refined of us."
Sanval simply looked puzzled at her tone.
"So, if this is the baby," said Kid, poking at the dead pile of fungus with one shiny hoof, "where is the mother, dear ones?
Everyone glanced around the room.
"I think it is time to start moving again," said Ivy.
For once, nobody argued with her.
Chapter Eight
Three possible exits from the city bath," Ivy pointed out to her friends, ticking them off on her fingers. "There's the lovely, dank, animal-dug tunnel which that baby phantom fungus came from."
"Where that bugbear's arm has gone, my dear. I'm sure that the mother fungus has it," said Kid, sniffing the air in that direction as he retrieved his stilettos.
"Which may have body parts and bigger phantom fungi," agreed Ivy. "Thank you for reminding us."
The whole group decided against exploring that tunnel. "Then there's the northern way," said Ivy, gesturing at the line of footprints that indicated where the rest of the unfortunate bugbear's party had apparently fled.
"That is the way that we should go," said Sanval. "If the bugbear was one of Fottergrim's raiders, then they may be setting up an ambush. They may be aiming for the Thultyrl's camp."
"We don't know that," said Ivy. "All we know is that they were down here, and they are probably not friendly."
As an officer of Procampur, Sanval pointed out that it was his duty to find out what the raiders were doing in these ruins
and, if possible, capture or kill them. He was very courteous about it and obviously expected everyone to agree with him.
Ivy looked at her friends, and they all rolled their eyes.
"We were not going that way," she told Sanval. "We need to get under the walls of Tsurlagol and bring the western wall down. As the Thultyrl decided."
Sanval looked unconvinced. But before he could voice another argument or strike out on his own, following that mysterious trail of footprints, Zuzzara grabbed him from behind in a friendly headlock. He squirmed, but the half-ore was stronger and quite a bit taller than the officer from Procampur. She leaned over his shoulder to look into his face and show him her grin, full of pointy teeth.
"I owe you my life for being so quick with your blade," said Zuzzara, "so I definitely cannot let you run off and get yourself killed."
To avoid getting his windpipe crushed by Zuzzara's concern, Sanval agreed to stay with the group, but he kept casting glances back at the line of footprints leading away from the bath.
"I should follow them," he said.
"Sweet," said Zuzzara, giving him another hug against her brass-buttoned waistcoat that caused all the breath to leave him with a giant whoosh.
"She's more dangerous friendly than angry," said Ivy, pulling Sanval away. "But she's right too. Sweet of you to want to do your duty. But not proper behavior for an officer."
Sanval's dark eyes widened. "I would never do anything that was inappropriate."
Ivy gave him her most innocent smile. "Then you will want to follow the Thultyrl's orders. He ordered you to go with us and stay with us and help us bring down the wall, didn't he?"
Sanval looked as if he had just swallowed something very bitter. The logic of Ivy's argument was inescapable. Yet, she
could see a certain doubt crawled across his handsome features. Would it be more fitting to chase after a possible threat to the Thultyrl or to carry out the Thultyrl's orders and stay with the Siegebreakers?
"It would be best to stay with us," Ivy answered his unspoken question. He looked even more troubled that she had guessed what he was thinking.
Kid trotted back and forth at the entrance to the eastern tunnel.
"Are we going or staying, my dear?" he said to Ivy, clip-clopping a little ways into the darkened entrance.
"Give me your torch," Ivy called to Zuzzara, putting het hand out for it. She took the lit torch from the half-ore and thrust it into the entrance of the tunnel. A long, smooth way ran straight ahead. Strong stone walls and ceiling were clearly visible. It was a tunnel built by humans (or more likely dwarves, added Mumchance). Best of all, it did not look as though it would easily collapse on them.
"It looks like a passage to Tsurlagol," decided Mumchance. "But it might take us farthet east than we want, toward the harbor gate rather than the southwest corner of the wall."
"We'll worry about that when we see where we come out," decided Ivy. "We do not have time to try every tunnel. This one looks the most promising to get us close to the wall."
The tunnel ran in a long curve, at times so narrow that they had to go in single file and at other times so wide that four could walk abreast. Kid led, so he could backtrack on the trail of the bugbear's party.
"Quick step, quick step," he chortled as he followed the faint trace of the footsteps in the dust. "They march straight, no pause, no doubt. They are hurrying away from where they came."
"Were they pursued?" asked Ivy.
"Yes, but much later; other feet have passed through here," said Kid. "But the followers miss the arch where we entered and go farther that way." Kid pointed to another tunnel, slanting west and north as far as they could tell.
Bending down to examine the floor, Kid seemed puzzled by some of the marks. "Footprints, here and here, but older tracks too. Tracks of rats on four little feet, tracks of kobolds chasing after the rats, tracks of something with no feet chasing after the kobolds."
"I do not like the sound of that," said Gunderal with a delicate shudder.
"Oh, my dear, these are old, old tracks," said Kid, one ear twitching back and forth in thought.
Ivy wondered if this tunnel had been a good choice. Still it was better than wandering after whatever party that bugbear came from, no matter how much a certain shiny gentleman kept making longing glances over his shoulder.
"What are the freshest tracks in this tunnel?" asked Ivy, convinced that she would not like the answer.
"Those we also saw in the room behind us, big feet and man-sized feet." Kid scratched his nose, obviously mulling over his answer. "And then there were those tracks that hugged the walls and never went to the center of the room."
"You didn't tell us about those!"
"You were in a hurry to leave, my dear. Another group of big feet went tiptoe through the room. The tracks were a little fresher than the dead bugbear that Zuzzara found. Another party of ores or bugbears perhaps, following the first group. Big hobnailed boots, all of them wore, and there were many treading over the other footsteps."
"Blast." Just what they needed: entire troop movements underground. Could Fottergrim be considering an ambush, using these tunnels to sneak some of his horde outside the walls
for a quick attack on the camp? Or was it someone else, with their own secret mission in this rotten, mixed-up, tangled ruin of a dead city with its long buried secrets? "Blast, blast, and blast!" muttered Ivy as she considered their options. Well, there was no way to go back, and whatever way that the bugbears or other creatures had entered, that had to lead to the outside. Get her above ground and in the open air, and she could work out a strategy. Or let her find the foundation of Tsurlagol's current western wall and she would topple it with great pleasure.
"Is there a problem?" As usual, Sanval's tone was courteous and pitched low enough to be discreet.
"Problem?" Ivy gave an exaggerated roll of her shoulders. "No problem at all! Just thinking about the best way to bring down that wall. A good spell blast, maybe."
"Ivy, we found something!" Zuzzara's bellow echoed through the long, narrow tunnel. An open doorway was carved into the wall. To enter the dark room beyond, they had to step up over a broad stone threshold. From the other side, the Siegebreakers could see the lintel of the door was carved with a procession of men and horses, dragging wagons full of jars behind them. The flare of Zuzzara's torch and the light of Mumchance's lantern revealed a long, narrow room with niches carved into the walls, filling the space from floor to ceiling. Neatly piled bones, three or four skulls resting on the top of each pile, occupied each niche.
"Funeral procession," said Mumchance, glancing up at the carving on the lintel. The carved parade continued across the ceiling, and small flecks of old paint brightened the ribbons carved around the spokes of the cartwheels and in the horses' manes.
"We are in an ossuary," said Sanval. "We have these in Procampur too. The dead are taken below the stteets once their bodies are burned."
"That is what I love about being underground," said Ivy, "the wonderful things that you get to see, like other peoples graveyards."
"Look at all the names on the wall," said Gunderal, going from niche to niche. "I can read them; this writing is not that old. There are whole families in some of these niches: mother, father, children."
"Not here," said Zuzzara, pausing before another niche. This one had a smaller pile of bones than the others, and only one skull rested on top. The skull looked a little lonely, Ivy thought. Gunderal leaned against her sister's shoulder and recited the epitaph inscribed upon the wall, her voice growing softer and sadder with each line.
"As for the name of this warrior, I do not know it, Nor do I know from what place he came. But he rode to our walls,
With his banner displayed and flying in the wind. At his boasting, the defenders drew their blades. We could not resist from beginning the battle. Four fellows caught him and beat upon him, Each stroke like a hammer upon an anvil. His armor split to reveal the treasure beneath. The wizards stole his gem, as they steal all. When he died, the ground was hard with hoar-frost. So we burned his body to keep him warm, And stored his bones among our dead. But his name we never learned, And his family mourns unknowing."
When Gunderal finished, even Zuzzara gave a little sniff and knuckled her eyes. Mumchance cleared his throat and rubbed Wiggles's ears. The little dog licked his hand.
Ivy just shrugged. She would not let such a memorial affect her. "So died a mercenary. Unknown, unnamed," she said.
Sanval gave her a peculiar look, almost sympathetic. Ivy ignored him. "I wonder what his treasure was."
"Probably meant that they cut out his heart," said Mumchance.
"I do not think it was his heart," said Gunderal. "Wizards would not have much use for that." She brushed an errant curl back behind her ear, tilting her head to one side in puzzlement. "There's something else here. Some runes below the bones, like the ones back in the mosaic. See that one"—she tapped the symbol with one shell pink nail—"is almost the same as the one written near the big jewel carried by that wizard toppling towers in the picture."
Distracted by a clattering sound, Ivy whipped around to see Kid poking through another pile of bones. She snapped an order at him. "Get away from that!"
Kid just gave her one of his pointed smiles and said, "No magic here, my dear. No spells. Just dead, cold dead, in their little pots and niches." He trotted back to where they stood. He leaned very close to the wall to study the peculiar runes pointed out by Gunderal. "Beautiful Gunderal is right. These are the same as the ones written in the mosaic. Jewels—these marks may mean jewels. And there are footprints below the niche that are the five that we tracked before. Looking for something, but finding nothing, I think." Something about the lone pile of bones discovered by the sisters intrigued him. Kid stuck his long, black-nailed fingers into the pile of bones before them, shifting the skull out of his way as he felt around the niche.
"I swear if you stir up another pathetic skeleton to attack us, I'm leaving you behind," exclaimed Ivy.
"Do skeletons attack him often?" asked Sanval, remembering the lurching collection of bones in the hall of ash.
"With depressing regularity," Ivy replied. "Skeletons, animated corpses, crawling hands of the undead. There's something about him. Like honey to bears. Get away from those bones! We don't have time, and there is nothing there for you to steal!" Ivy suddenly could not bear to see the lonely mercenary disturbed again. Eventually, everyone should be allowed some peace and rest. She reached out and smacked Kid not too gently across his bottom.
"I go, I go," bleated Kid in mock terror, skipping out of her reach. "See how swift I run. Can you catch me, my dears?"
Rounding a corner at a quick trot, Kid almost smashed his nose on the stone wall that blocked the tunnel ahead. Ivy swore. They had reached a dead end.
"Just need to find the handle," said Mumchance, running his hands over the smooth marble wall. "It must open. They did not walk through solid stone."
Gunderal nodded and passed her hands over the wall as well, making ladylike sniffs, as she tried to divine what type of lock might hold the door closed.
"So who do you think is down here?" Sanval asked Ivy as the pair in front of them tried to open the secret door.
"Treasure hunters, most likely, and not from Procampur's side of the wall," Ivy admitted with as much candor as she could spare. She was not going to mention her worries about possible stray troops from Fottergrim's horde. That would be enough to send Sanval dashing off in the darkness to save the day and probably get himself killed. "You have camels but no bugbears among your mercenaries. It could be deserters, which would be an encouraging sign, but you would think that they would be carrying more gear with them."
"Why are deserters a good sign?"
"Now you want to chat? When we are in a hole in the ground with no clear way out?"
"Do you have something else to do? Just now?" And the man even made his comments sound reasonable, much to Ivy's disgust.
Mumchance muttered something about missing his good pick and gestured Zuzzara to come forward. He took her shovel and tried to wedge the blade under the secret door. Ivy and Sanval moved farther back down the tunnel to give them room to work.
"Why are deserters a good sign?" When Sanval wanted to talk, he evidently wanted to talk.
"Because you don't desert if you think you're going to win. You leave when the food starts running low, or the water runs out, or the guy in charge turns out to be a raving lunatic with delusions of immortality and world conquest. Which happens far more frequently than you would think sensible. Look at Fottergrim."
"World conquest?"
"Well, no, not since the Black Horde was destroyed. But why be such an idiot ore and seize a city? Especially such a city with such a history of bad luck. No one has ever managed to hold onto Tsurlagol. Wandering here and there in the hills, he could survive. Raid a town for a day, carry away the chickens and children, that I can understand." Sanval gave her one of those straight down the nose looks that were a specialty of his. "Not approve, mind you, but understand."
"About the chickens?" His tone was exceptionally dry.
"And the children. An ore has to eat, and he has to have somebody to wash out his laundry. A moving horde like Fottergrim's needs slaves to do all the tasks that fighters think are so far beneath them."
"Laundry."
"Cooking, digging latrines, washing socks. Even if you only change your socks once a year, it is nice to have a clean, dry pair."
"So why not take a city and enslave its citizens?"
"Because it is too big. Somebody is sure to object, like Procampur, and knock the walls down and take it back. It is strange. Fottergrim has been unusually clever for an ore these past ten years. It is almost as if someone talked him into taking the city. Or he was seized by divine madness. And I will bet you my nonexistent lunch and unlikely dinner, he is up on the walls right now, regretting that he ever invaded Tsurlagol."
"So you think we can win the siege," persisted Sanval.
"Certainly hope so," replied Ivy, trying for a nonchalant tone to impress him. "Because we don't get paid unless Procampur wins. So I would like to bring a wall down before I leave for better places. And nothing is getting done by standing here!"
The last was pitched much louder and Mumchance responded with, "We're trying, Ivy." The dwarf dropped to his hands and knees, sniffing along the floor like a hunting hound, obviously trying to scent some stray draft blowing under the door that might reveal an opening. Wiggles ran around him, occasionally giving the dwarPs red nose a big lick. "Get away, sweetheart," muttered Mumchance at the dog. "Let me do my work."
"Perhaps Enguerrand can succeed without your help," suggested Sanval. He probably meant his words as a kindness, but that statement pricked Ivy's pride.
"Give me pike dwarfs and gnome archers, and I can topple any cavalry charge," said Ivy. "And Fottergrim has much more than that."
"Pikes and arrows would not work against such trained cavalry as Enguerrand leads," stated Sanval with calm conviction.
"Does. Did. That's how I met Mumchance," said Ivy. Sanval cocked an eyebrow.
"In the mud, pinned under a horse, having been on the wrong end of the charge," explained Ivy. "Terrible day, rain pouring down, fresh plowed field all gone to muck. But there were these dwarves and gnomes. Just standing there. Waiting for us. They looked so very short from where we were sitting on top of our great big chargers. So the trumpets sound, the drums beat, and we go racing up hill in full armor in the stupidest charge in the history of horse-mounted warfare. I was one of the lucky ones. The arrows got my horse, and it rolled over on me. That horse's death saved me from being spit on the pikes. Also I fell face up, rather than face down, so I didn't drown in the mud."
"How old were you?" said Sanval.
"Fifteen and foolish at that age, like all young humans," said Mumchance standing up and brushing off his knees. He hooked his little hammer out of his belt and began tapping on the door, pressing one ear against the stone to listen for echoes. With a roll of his good eye toward Ivy, he added, "But she was politer than most."
"Keep working," said Ivy. "You don't have time to gossip." To Sanval, she said, "My mother taught me court courtesy."
"Really?" said Sanval, clearly remembering the song about the red-roof girls and a few other comments.
"Oh, I can speak like a lady when I need to," said Ivy with a blush. She remembered the song too. It lacked elegance. Any Procampur court lady would swoon at the first verse alone, and it was probably just as well that she'd stopped before she'd gotten to the last lyric, because that might have caused a few of the more squeamish Procampur gentlemen to faint too. That boy in the Forty had been extremely pink in the face when she had passed him in front of the Thultyrl's tent. "And my father was a druid who taught me how to keep my mouth shut. The elves used to call him the Silent Walker. For example, he would
never interrupt a good story halfway through. It was one of the things my mother liked best about him whenever his silence wasn't driving her crazy."
Sanval did not say anything.
"My manners saved my life," Ivy continued. "There I was, pinned under a dead horse, with this dwarf sitting on top and asking me what I thought I was doing there. I told him the truth. I absolutely didn't know why I was fighting that war, but I would appreciate a little help."
"So I dug her out and dried her off". By then the girls' father had disappeared, and their mothers were gone, and I thought I could use a little extra help at the farm." Mumchance pushed Zuzzara's shovel's edge against the bottom of the stone door. Scraping sounds, the high-pitched kind that made the back of Ivy's teeth hurt, filled the tunnel and caused the others to retreat a few steps. With a grunt, Mumchance pulled the shovel out from under the door and returned it to Zuzzara. "Well, that didn't work. Gunderal, any luck?"
Gunderal muttered something that sounded terribly close to a swear word. Zuzzara looked slightly shocked; Zuzzara's mother had never let her use language like that! But, being a water genasi, Gunderal's mother had possessed a very salty tongue when she was angry. Gunderal's vocabulary was far less delicate than her looks.
"There is a lock, a magical lock," muttered Gunderal. "I am sure of it. But it is on the other side of the door, and I can't tell you anything more."
"It was the most miserable little war. Neither of us could see any reason to stay," Ivy continued talking to Sanval. She never had any luck with magic doors. If Gunderal and Mumchance could not open it, they would have to go back. She kept chattering to distract herself from screaming in frustration. "So we deserted, Mumchance and I. It was the sensible thing to do."
"And this war?" asked Sanval with more than polite curiosity.
"Oh, as miserable as the rest," said Mumchance, still staring at the door. The dwarf frowned, the lines crossing his forehead deepening, and the scars across his face more pronounced than ever. With the iron clad toe of his boot, he softly kicked the obstacle facing him—a straight line across the bottom of the door, clang, clang, clang—but nothing rattled or echoed in the stone door. "But war pays our bills. That is why mercenaries fight, boy. For the money. Not honor, not glory, not history. For loot. Well, except for the odd bad one...."
"The ones that fight because they like it," said Ivy. "And before you ask, we are the good kind of mercenary. The ones who care most for gold."
Sanval did not look reassured.
"So why do you fight?" she asked.
"Because I am a noble of Procampur, pledged to the service of the Thultyrl. And he is a good king, the wisest we have had for some time. But even if he were the worst of tyrants, I would still answer his call. My family has always served the Thultyrl."
"What sort of family do you have?"
Sanval frowned. "None now, but I come from people who do their duty. My parents did as their families asked. They were betrothed in their cradles and married at the most auspicious time determined by their parents."
"And were they happy?"
"I do not know," admitted Sanval. "I never saw them except at formal gatherings. We send our children to the schools fot those of our district, to be raised together by approved tutors. Like most boys, I seldom left my dormitory until I came of age, and by then my parents had perished from the same fever that killed the old Thultyrl."
Ivy grinned at him. "Bet you never thought your path would drop you underground with a bunch of mercenaries unsuccessfully trying to break through a door." The last sentence was made directly to the dwarf still kicking the door in front of her.
"Maybe a counterweight, above the door," speculated Mumchance, ignoring Ivy. "Hey, Zuzzara, give me a boost UP-"
Zuzzara grabbed the dwarf around the waist and lifted him to her shoulders. His head rapped smartly on the stone ceiling. "Sorry," said Zuzzara with a grunt as she adjusted the dwarf s feet on her shoulders.
"No," said Mumchance feeling along the lintel. "Nothing here. Let me down. Gently! Gently!"
Zuzzara caught him as he flipped off her shoulders and just prevented him from landing headfirst on the floor. Kid snickered, and even Gunderal looked a little less depressed.
After several more attempts to get the door to open, they declared themselves defeated. Mumchance admitted that without the exact knowledge of how the door locked and unlocked, they could not open it.
Gunderal, in particular, was very upset by her failure after having such recent improvement with the phantom fungus. Zuzzara told her sister not to worry, that her spells would come back soon.
"Like you would know anything about magic," said Gunderal with a tearful sniff. She fumbled a handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed her eyes.
"I know nothing about magic," admitted Zuzzara with one of her deep chuckles and a pat on the back that caused Gunderal to stumble. Ever since Gunderal had managed at least the frost spell against the animated fungus, Zuzzara had cheered up. She no longer suggested carrying her little sister
or whispered to Ivy about the possibilities of blood poisoning developing from a sprained arm. "But I know you, little sister. You may be pretty, but you are not dumb."
It was the start of an old family joke, and Gunderal giggled. "And big and ugly doesn't mean you're stupid."
"Unless you fall down on the way to the outhouse." Zuzzara added the obscure punchline that Ivy had never understood.
Gunderal started laughing so hard that she had to stop to mop the streaming tears out of her eyes.
"Sisters," moaned Ivy. "I will never, ever, campaign with sisters again!"
"You say that every time," said Mumchance. "Hurry up, you two. No point standing around here now."
As he turned, he bumped into Ivy, who stumbled and thrust out her left hand to catch herself. As she fell against the wall, she felt a stone shift beneath her gloved hand. A grating sound came from the floor beneath them, and the entire room shook.
"Earthquake?" asked Sanval in a calm but resigned tone, as he kept his balance on the shifting stone.
"Wizard work," shouted Mumchance over the crunch of rock sliding over rock. The whole room lurched to the left and bumped to a stop. A new door opened in front of them, with a black corridor running before them. The stone door behind them and the entrance to the ossuary before them had disappeared.
"Shifting passage," grumbled Mumchance. "Sort of stupid thing that wizards put in for short cuts."
"Well," said Ivy, still determined to be optimistic, "perhaps this leads straight outside."
"Did you suspect such a possibility?" Sanval asked Mumchance.
"I suspect everything, but that never finds the key to a shifting passage. Only a truly lucky or miserably unlucky accident
does that," the dwarf complained and stamped ahead of them through the opening.
"And which kind of accident is this, my dear?" speculated Kid with a soft laugh at the dwarps grumbling.
"Won't know until we get there," said Mumchance over his shoulder. "Come on, Wiggles, hurry up." The little dog was lagging behind and seemed reluctant to enter the room. The dwarf whistled. Wiggles tucked het tail firmly between her legs and slunk Into the passage behind him.
In the darkness far ahead of the Siegebreakers, the magelord hissed and stopped. He had felt something, like a cold draft across his spell-laden shoulders. The charms attached to his robe murmured to him, giving him advance warning of a new danger. Magic ... Somebody or something had woken up an old magic in these tunnels.
"Fools." He peered back into the blackness outside the yellow light cast by the torches. Fottergrim had set trackers on his trail. He had known that the big ore would do that. Who knew what those idiots had stirred up? If only that foolish ore had done what he had told him to and stayed outside the walls of Tsurlagol, letting him explore these tunnels in peace. No, no, the big stupid oaf had to smash his way into the city and start a war!
The bugbears surrounding him shuffled their broad feet and voiced their complaints. They had been growing more obnoxious in their objections since they had had to abandon that one female bugbear. As if such a creature mattered to him! A quick snap of the fingers, and a quicker flash of fire lit up the tunnel, turning the bugbears' complaints to sullen but subdued snarls.
"We are being followed," he informed them. After all, it was the bugbears' job to guard him while he went about his
business. He had already paid them a half-horse worth of nearly fresh meat that morning. And promised them more in the evening. "Be alert!"
But he decided not to rely on the bugbears alone—they were stupid creatures whose big muscles gave them their only worth in his estimation. Something else slithered through the ruins of buried Tsurlagol, something large and scaled and hungry.
With a few muttered words, and at the cost of only one charm, the magelord called the creature to him. At his feet was the big hole that they had just climbed out of. It was another dead end for his treasure hunt, but a perfect trap for anyone foolish enough to follow him.
The new tunnel led the Siegebreakers into another broad room, wider than the first. Like the ossuary, it contained bones—only these were strewn across the floor as well as piled into niches. At the sight and smell of the bones, Wiggles's ears went up. The little dog tentatively wagged her tail. Mumchance snatched at her collar to keep her from grabbing the nearest bone. While hauling Wiggles away, the dwarf noticed that there was one peculiarity about all the skeletons scattered across the floor.
"There are no heads," Mumchance said. "Where have all the skulls gone?"
"Burial rite?" guessed Ivy.
Kid advanced into the center of the room. He glanced at Ivy, waiting for her to tell him not to touch. When she said nothing, he stretched out one little hoof and stirred the bones. An odd grin of amusement spread across his face. "Perhaps someone took away the skulls for a collection, my dears, or to roll them through the ruins for their pleasure."
"There's something evil here," said Gunderal with a shiver at the little thiePs suggestions. "I can feel it." She passed Kid, going into the center of the room and looking right and left. "There's something hiding here. I know it."
Gunderal peered into the shadowy niches lining the walls, with Zuzzara following directly behind her.
"Let's just get out of here," suggested Ivy.
"No," Gunderal almost snapped at her. "We have to find it first. If we try to pass before we find it, we'll end up like those skeletons."
"How can you be certain?"
"Because I am a wizard," said Gunderal with more force than normal. "Evil was done here."
"Come on, Gunderal," said her sister. "You are just nervous. It has been a bad day."
The wizard heaved a sigh. "Don't tell me what I'm feeling. This is what I am good at, sensing magic, just as you are good at hitting things." Gunderal moved back to the center of the room. Rather than skipping lightly around the bones on the floor, as she would normally do, she kicked her way through a rib cage, sending bits rolling off to one side. "Show yourself. I know you are there," she said.
Everyone looked at Gunderal, then looked around the room, not asking to whom she spoke. She was a wizard, and they respected that. Still, they had never seen her talk to a pile of bones before. When a thin, strange voice answered her, they all became motionless. Ivy liked to think that standing frozen like a statue in the marketplace was a sign of alertness on her part, never fear. She glanced at Sanval. As always when faced with danger, his face was as frozen as the farm pond in midwinter. But he did give the tiniest shrug of inquiry. Ivy raised her eyebrows and shook her head when he started to move forward. She trusted Gunderal's instincts. The little genasi
had gotten them out of more than one magical trap. Besides, from the way that Kid's ears were swiveling back and forth in nervous agitation, she was sure that he felt something peculiar in the room too.
A voice said, "The wizard is clever. Very clever. But is the wizard clever enough to best me?"
In an unnoticed niche, a soft green glow began to brighten. As it floated out into the room, they saw the light was a human skull surrounded by a jagged green flame that ringed it much like a lion's head is ringed by its mane. Its eyes glittered, points of green fire. The light increased and reflected off the walls, turning the room into a flickering green grotto.
"All heads belong to me," said the flameskull, apparendy untroubled by its lack of a body. The thing had no lips, no flesh at all, just clean jawbones clacking away. Unfortunately, it did have a few teeth—brown and half-rotted—that wobbled in a disgusting manner when it spoke. "They told me that when they left me here."
"And who would they be?" Gunderal sounded as if she were making pleasant conversation in her own parlor, but she waved her uninjured hand frantically behind her back, gesturing to the others to gather closer to her.
"My two friends, my two fond friends, my two cherished dead friends," said the flameskull, floating effortlessly in front of Gunderal. "We had heard that Tsurlagol had fallen and all its treasures were buried in its ruins. So we came to dig them out again. We were wizards too—not insignificant spellcasters or mountebanks, but masters of magnificent magic. We came looking for the glittering gems and the great diamond buried with them."
"Any luck?" Ivy could not resist asking even as Gunderal made shushing motions.
For a creature with no face, it was amazingly clear that the
flameskull had setded into a sulk. Ivy guessed it had something to do with how the flames writhed in the eyesockets and the tone of voice issuing from its mouth. "They left me behind," it said with a distinct snarl. "They left me behind and told me to take the skulls of any who followed us. But I cursed them both even as they chopped off my head and arms and hid my body in the ruins."
"There's nothing worse than an argument among thieves, my dear," said Kid in a tone laden with bitter experience. "Especially when they are magical thieves."
"They left me behind," the skull repeated. The flames around the bony head died down a little, as if depression dampened the creature's fire.
"Obviously not the best of friends," said Ivy, hoping to keep the skull talking, because she could see that Gunderal was about to cast some type of spell. "I wouldn't do what they told me to do. Especially if they cut off my head before they told me."
"Huh! As if I have a choice," snapped the skull with a click of its rotted teeth. His flames brightened to a wide halo of green fire around his head. "They have been dead and gone for a generation or more! I am still here! And all have to pay toll to me. Pay me in skulls! Or rot as they rotted!" The creature's voice rose in anger, its fiery halo brightened, and two bolts of flame shot from its eyesockets.
Before the fire could touch anyone, Gunderal raised a wall of water between the Siegebreakers and the flameskull. The flames licked out in pointed flickers, tossing a spray of green sparks. They hit the water wall and hissed, spat, and sizzled. The wall shimmered green, and then the flames extinguished themselves in the water.
"Well done, wizard," said the flameskull. "Quite well done. But what will you do now? Remember, whoever collects the
most heads wins. And that is always me, me, me!"
"Cheeky thing for a dead head," said Mumchance.
"Does your game have rules?" Ivy shouted at the flameskull, hoping to keep it talking and distract it from flinging more flame spells at them. Gunderal's wall of water looked very wobbly, and Ivy suspected the spell was not too stable.
"You've got to smash it," Gunderal muttered to Ivy, confirming her worst fears. "Quickly. The wall won't hold."
"It moves pretty fast," Ivy said. The flameskull was zipping back and forth, trying to find a way around the wall, but it was also keeping away from the water. It appeared to not want to get wet.
"I can hit it," said Sanval, sliding his sword out of his scabbard. "Should I jump through the wall?"
"No!" they all yelled. "That will just make the wall disappear!" All the Siegebreakers knew the basic mechanics of Gunderal's spell. They had used the wall of water many times before to shelter from some flame or other, even from fires that they had statted themselves.
"I can make you faster," said Gunderal to Sanval, "but I need to drop the water wall. I can't do two spells at the same time." Already the wall was becoming misty around the edges as the water started to fade away. The flameskull bobbed closer, obviously trying to listen to their conversation. It tilted its bony head, and odd sparks shot from its eye sockets.
Zuzzara shifted so she was nearer to her sister. "I'll protect you while you're casting your spell," she said to Gunderal, "but be quick, little sister, be quick."
"Drop the wall, Gunderal," commanded Ivy. "We'll scatter and try to divert its attack. Sanval, you'd better crush that thing on the first try!"
The wall vanished, and Ivy flung herself directly under the
skull, sliding on her stomach through the bones on the floor. As she had intended, the flameskull spun in place, turning itself upside down as it tried to track her movements. A bolt of energy from the skull's mouth whizzed by her ear and extinguished itself in the floor beside her.
Zuzzara swung with her shovel at the back of the flameskull at the same time that Ivy flung herself under the floating flaming head. The half-ore missed, the flameskull shooting up toward the ceiling too quickly for her to connect with. The flameskull twisted around, trying to hit her with blasts of energy. The mane of flame whipped around the skull, long green tendrils hissing through the air. Again, with a howl of frustration, the skull's energy bolt undershot its target as Zuzzara grabbed her sister around the waist and leaped out of the way.
Gunderal let out a little squeak as the two of them rolled across the floor, outside the flameskull's range. "Let me down. Sanval, get over here," the wizard called.
"Missed, missed, missed with your missile," yelled Kid, cartwheeling around the skull, which had zipped lower again in an attempt to hit Ivy with a whip of fire. His hooves clicked on the floor, then spun in the air close to the skull as he went into a handstand. The flameskull blasted upward with a whistling screech, dived in a wide arc over Kid's flailing hooves, and aimed itself again at Ivy. In desperation, Ivy grabbed an old shinbone off the floor and lobbed it with her left hand at the skull. One end knocked against the flameskull's bony pate. The skull hit the floor with a thud and rolled to a dazed stop, then slowly drifted upward. Ivy heard a sharp bark and a "No!" from Mumchance. Wiggles raced past her, barking wildly and dancing on her back paws, trying to catch the skull floating above her.
"Crazy dog!" yelled Ivy, grabbing for Wiggles's collar.
"That's a bad, old bone. You don't want that." She scooped the little dog up and tossed Wiggles to Mumchance. The dwarf caught Wiggles and dropped her behind him.
"Stay!" said Mumchance sternly in Dwarvish. Wiggles folded her ears back and dropped to a crouch. She kept giving out eager little whines as she watched the flameskull bounce and dip around the room. The little dog started to crawl forward on her front legs, rump high in the air and fluffy tail wagging madly.
"No!" said Mumchance again in Dwarvish. "Bad dog! Settle!"He picked up a collarbone from the floor and chucked it with a big overhand throw at the flameskull. The undead head bounced out of the way with a jeer.
"Can't hit me!" yelled the flameskull and spat another ball of sparks at the dwarf. Mumchance skipped to one side with the lightness of a dwarf half his age, Wiggles dancing at his heels.
Kid spun around the flameskull, flipping and cartwheeling to confuse the creature. With one big spin, he managed to clip it with the edge of one hoof, shoving it back against the stone wall. "You cannot catch us. We are too quick for an old cracked head like you!" he said.
A spray of green sparks zoomed past Kid. Several settled on the toe of one of Sanval's boots. The smell of burnt polish and leather filled the air. Glaring at the boot, Sanval rubbed the damaged toe against the back of the opposite shin, then glared again as he stamped down his foot. A large scorch mark marred the shiny polished surface of the toe.
"That does it," he muttered. "Get me there, wizard!"
Sanval slid into place next to Gunderal. With a quickly whispered spell, she slapped Sanval hard between the shoulders, shouting, "Go, go!"
Screaming, the skull dived after Kid, spreading a trail of
green fire and ignoring Sanval, who charged after it. With magically enhanced speed, Sanval swung his sword down on the skull. The brittle bone shattered, scattering pieces around the room.
It had only taken a few moments. As quickly as the threat had appeared, it was gone. Ivy sat at the edge of the room, shaking her head. "Well, that was fun, I think. Good work, Gunderal."
"Oh dear," said Gunderal, pointing at the shattered bits of skull scattered through the other bones. Tendrils of green flame were sprouting from each separate piece of the skull. As they all watched, the pale green flames twisted across the room, reaching for each other. "We should leave now."
"Isn't it dead?" asked Sanval, straightening his helmet after he sheathed his sword.
"It was always dead," explained Gunderal, pushing them toward the archway at the opposite end of the room. "But it is one of those dead things that can put itself back together again."
"I hate those types of dead things," grumbled Mumchance.
"Dead should stay dead," added Zuzzara, picking up the torch and shovel that she had dropped when she grabbed Gunderal. She thrust the shovel, handle straight down, through her belt and raised the still-lit torch high to illuminate the exit.
"I could not agree more," said Kid, skipping back and forth and watching how the green flames tended to bend toward him whenever he passed too close. "But perhaps we can break this spell." He reached down and scooped up one rotten molar that had been knocked out of the flameskull's jaw. Kid tucked it into one of the many pouches dangling from his belt.
"Ugh, that is one terrible souvenir," commented Zuzzara as they left the room. "Kid, you should leave it be."
"No, he should take it," said Gunderal. "Such guardians can rarely reassemble themselves if you take away a piece."
"Hope you're right, little sister," said Zuzzara. "That thing nearly burned my britches."
"Of course, I'm right. I told you. Trust me, I know magic."
Beyond the room containing the flameskull was a swift, hidden passage back to the place where they fought the phantom fungus. Once they reached that room, the Siegebreakers would have no choice but to follow the northern passageway that Sanval had wanted to take in the first place—the one that sent them on the trail of the other party in the ruins and, possibly, a troop of Fottergrim's raiders. Ivy thought that Sanval looked smug, but when he caught her staring his face smoothed into that irritating bland look that he was so very good at.
"Gunderal seems pleased," said Ivy to Mumchance, watching the little wizard walking in front of them. Although she still cradled her injured arm, the wizard held her head straight, and her long black hair bounced on her shoulders, free at last from its confining top-knot.
"Yes," said Mumchance, but there was no elation in his voice.
"What is wrong?"
"Not all her spells worked," Mumchance replied with a frown. "She couldn't throw a decent frost, that wall of water nearly collapsed, and she should have been quicker with slapping that last spell on Sanval. That trick should have been easier for her. And, Ivy, we may need more from her before we are out of here. The river is going to worm its way into these tunnels. I just know it. And the only one of us that has any control over water is Gunderal. But if she has no control over her magic, then we are sunk—way down in the mud sunk."
"You worry too much," said Ivy. Gunderal had been slow in the fight—Ivy had never seen her more unsure when casting a
spell—but she was not going to give the dwarf the satisfaction of agreeing with his gloomy prognostication. After all, she was the captain of this little company, and a captain should be optimistic even when she was stuck up to her hips in a mucky situation with only one shovel to dig herself out. She tried to cheer the dwarf up. "After we got away from the river bank, it's been bone dry, even in the ossuary!"
"Make jokes if you want. But it doesn't feel dry to me. Just you wait and see."
As they entered the baths, the smell of the dead phantom fungus assaulted their noses. Mumchance glanced down into the dry pool with the mosaic bottom, shifting his head so he was staring straight down with his good eye. He cursed—quiet little curses that made Wiggles whine—and waved his lantern over the edge of the pool. Dry dust had become slimy mud, and water clearly shone in the light of the torch.
"The river is rising," Mumchance said, "and the water is running through the old pipes that fed the bath."
"Well, that's something less than wonderful," observed Ivy before Mumchance could say anything more and upset everyone. Nobody needed to hear "I told you so" right now, most especially her.
But Ivy was more worried than she let her friends see. The water was rising, and they still had no idea how to get out of the ruins of Tsurlagol. Ivy feared they might have to swim to make it out.
Chapter Nine
When they passed out of the chamber still stinking of dead bugbear and fungus, the Siegebreakers entered into a network of much broader tunnels. Looking at the ledges running high above them, Mumchance suggested that they were traveling down an ancient and dried-out storm sewer.
"And," he pointed out glumly, "if it was a storm drain, it means that it had pipes feeding into it—the type of pipes that will carry the rising river water into it."
"We'll worry about that when our feet get wet," countered Ivy.
Kid picked up new sets of tracks in the tunnel. The four who had fled from the phantom fungus and a larger group following them. "Wide feet, short legs, iron nails striking sparks on the stone as they march along," said Kid, clicking beside the group, still watching for tracks in the dirt. "And that other thing behind, dragging over their footsteps and wiping some away." At one point, he stopped and stooped, tracing the peculiar track with one hand. "One very large snake moving very fast." Satisfied once the mysterious track was identified, Kid wandered out of the circle of lights cast by their torches and lantern, sniffing the air for more tunnel entrances.
"Fottergrim had hobgoblins and mountain ores moving in and out of the city until we bottled up the western woods," observed Sanval. "We never could find their tunnel. Maybe this is it." He sounded excited and pleased by the prospect of running into an unknown number of adversaries.
"Maybe these are old tracks," said Ivy, with very little hope.
"New," said Kid, rejoining the group. "A day, not more, perhaps less, my dear."
Upon hearing that, Ivy shifted her position to the front, grabbing a torch from Zuzzara in passing. In her opinion, she was the best fighter among them, even if she did not have the shiniest armor.
"Who is playing hero now?" whispered Mumchance to her.
"Hey," said Ivy in sharp if not coherent rebuke.
The dwarf jerked his head back toward Sanval. "You are mad that he killed the fungus."
"Not at all," hissed Ivy. "Did you smell that thing?"
"And smashed that skull."
"He needed Gunderal's help to do that."
"And Zuzzara stopped the kobolds."
"Zuzzara is good with kobolds. I am more than happy to let her bat them around."
"So why are you shoving to the front?"
"Because I don't know if it is kobolds, fungus, or more talking skulls around the corner. And you know the rule. It's only a good day..."
".. When everybody gets to go home."
"So far, it has been a very bad day. I want it to be a good one," said Ivy. "Besides, right now, if we run into anything that is not an ally, I would prefer to hit it hard and keep hitting it until I feel better."
"Fair enough," agreed Mumchance. The dwarf put Wiggles down to run. She raced past Ivy, yip-yap-yip, except the last yap cut off abruptly.
"Wiggles!" yelled Mumchance. The dark way before them was filled with silence and shadows. "Wiggles!" The dwarf whistled and whistled again.
Kid's sharp ears caught the answering bark. "Ahead, dear sir, ahead," he said. "And down."
Around the next corner, the floor just disappeared. Ivy spotted the darkness half a step short of the edge, her foot raised. She stopped and leaned back, slapping her hand against the wall to balance herself. She raised the torch that she was carrying as high as possible to illuminate the hallway. The hole stretched halfway across the corridor. There was no sign of Wiggles.
"Stupid, stupid mutt," murmured Ivy as she hung over the edge and waved her torch in an attempt to see Wiggles. Ivy's torch barely lit the wall for several feet down, and then the hole went black. "Dumb, dumb dog." But she muttered softly, so Mumchance could not hear. He was too busy whistling and calling to the little dog to pay any attention.
"Stay, Wiggles, stay!" the dwarf yelled into the black hole.
"Truly, truly wonderful," said Ivy.
"I'll go, Ivy," said Mumchance. "I can grab her and get back here fast."
Ivy stared at the dwarf, who was at least three centuries older than her and never a good climber, and sighed. "No, I will go down. I will get Wiggles. I will bring her back. You will all stay here and do nothing foolish, like come after me."
She did not hear a chorus of agreement.
"That was an order," she said.
There was still silence.
"I am an officer of Procampur—" Sanval began.
Ivy interrupted him. "Which means that small white dogs are not your responsibility. Protecting my friends, however..."
"They will be safe. I will protect them," he stated in his quiet manner. Ivy believed him. It had to be, she decided later, the way that he just gleamed in the torchlight. Shiny armor. It just made a man look like a hero, Ivy thought. Something about the way that he stood too. Absolutely straight. Sword drawn and clasped in both hands, point down. She had tried that stance a couple of times when she was younger. It had never worked for her. But Sanval, he made it look natural—like one of those guardian statues in the better class of temple. Although most guardian statues did not have a huge scorch mark running across one shiny boot and a worried frown wrinkling a normally smooth forehead.
"It will be all right," she said, just to make that line disappear. It certainly did not suit Sanval's usual noble and serene demeanor. Ivy handed her torch to Kid, who just stood there looking at her with an eerily similar crease in the middle of his forehead that made the outer edges of his eyebrows tip up even more dramatically. "Don't worry. Whatever went down there is long gone. Just look after my friends."
"Ivy, I got a rope off that dead bugbear," said Zuzzara, uncoiling it from around her waist.
"See why we loot the dead when we can?" Ivy said to Sanval. He made no reply.
Ivy pulled her gloves off her belt and put them on to protect her hands from the rope. She shifted her sword on her back again, making sure the ties were tight
"Now, remember, everyone is going to stay right here," she said. Zuzzara found a protruding rock and tied off the rope, dropping it down into the black hole. Ivy grabbed the line and slowly descended into the darkness below.
A torch dropped past her. It lit the bottom of the hole with a faint pool of light. Ivy glanced down. She could not see Wiggles, but she could hear the dog whining below her.
She hit the sandy bottom of the hole and began to call the dog. "Come on, Wiggles, come here," she cajoled. "Come on, darling."
A sharp bark sounded ahead of her. Ivy picked up the torch and advanced farther into the hole. She spotted the shine of white fur. Wiggles was backed into a crack in the wall, tail between her legs, ears flat back against her head.
"Come on, Wiggles," said Ivy, "you know me. Nothing to be worried about. Come out, there's a good girl."
The dog remained motionless, her eyes staring at Ivy, and she gave a soft whine.
Intent on the dog cowering away from her, Ivy tripped over the giant black snake slithering across the floor. The creature reared up with a hiss, its mouth open and its fangs gleaming. Its head swung slowly, dipped to the floor of the pit, and led the curve of its body in a circle around her feet. She grabbed for her sword, trying to pull it one-handed out of the scabbard tied on her back while keeping the torch between her and the serpent's bobbing head. The creature lashed out with unbelievable speed, uncoiling its length and circling upward around and around, over her ankles, around her knees, and up her thighs. Ivy lost her grip on the torch, which bounced harmlessly off the snake's back and rolled away.
The serpent twisted up Ivy's body faster and faster, like lighting striking up from the ground. It pinned her arms in place; her right hand was twisted awkwardly up by her shoulder, still fumbling for her sword hilt. But her armor protected her arm, and, as painful as her pinned arm was, the position also kept the snake off of her throat.
Ivy screamed—outraged at the suddenness of the attack, furious at the pain of her twisted arm—and tried to lunge out of the snake's coils. She could not move! The creature's body lapped around her, pressing against her ribs, and little stars danced in front of her eyes as the breath was slowly squeezed out of her. Her pulse beat frantically in her throat, and she knew that soon her heart would be crushed to a stop. The serpent's terrible head brushed against her face. She twisted her face clear, drawing shallow breaths against the overwhelming pressure, desperately trying to think of a way to escape from the crushing grip.
Fangs, fangs, the thing had enormous fangs. She remembered the ivory flash in the torch light. Poisonous? Did crushing serpents need poison? Something snagged at the edge of her thick blonde braid and pulled it forward around her neck so that it hung over the front of her shoulder. For a terrible moment, her own hair felt almost like a second serpent around her throat. She could not draw a deep enough breath to scream again, but in her mind she was shrieking.
When Ivy screamed, Sanval raced past Mumchance. He leaped straight out and, as gravity grabbed him, disappeared straight down.
"Sanval, stop! That is the most unbelievably stupid," the dwarf yelled as Sanval's brilliantly shined helmet disappeared below the lip of the hole, "and brave. .. . Zuzzara, follow him! Ivy is in trouble!"
The Siegebreakers rushed to the edge of the hole. Zuzzara grabbed the rope and swung after the Procampur officer.
Wiggles barked hysterically.
Landing on the sandy floor with a thud, Sanval scooped Ivy's still burning torch from the floor. He thrust it toward the
serpents eyes, less than a hand's width from Ivy's face, momentarily blinding the beast. The heat of the torch flared against Ivy's cheek, but the serpent's grip was so tight that she could not even wince. The giant snake hissed and wavered, obviously confused as to whether to bite Sanval or crush Ivy. Sanval ground the torch into one of the serpent's eyes. It popped and sizzled with a sickening smell right under Ivy's offended nose. She gagged. The giant snake tried to twist around and face this new threat with its one remaining eye.
With a prolonged hiss, the creature struck at Sanval. Its ivory fangs gleamed more brightly than the Procampur captain's sword.
Faster than one of Ivy's thundering heartbeats, Sanval thrust up with his blade, skewering the serpent through the jaw and piercing straight into its brain. The creature collapsed, its coils tightening in one last spasm of cruel strength, then going slack around Ivy's body.
Ivy could clearly see her open-mouthed expression in the polished gloss of Sanval's breastplate as he tried to catch her with his free hand. She slid down in front of him until she was kneeling on the floor.
"That was ... That was ..." She could not think what to say. She remained on her knees, gasping for breath.
A worried Zuzzara dropped from the rope, arriving on the pit's floor with an audible thump of haste. Her shovel was held high, ready to brain any attacker. "Ivy? Sanval? Are you all right?"
Wiggles crept out of the hole where she was hiding and rushed to Ivy, collapsing by her side with a doggy sigh of relief.
Ivy swallowed and tried to speak again. She could feel her ribs creaking when she took a deep breath, but nothing felt broken. She shook herself free of the coils of the dead serpent, as Sanval pulled the weight of it away from her.
Sanval caught her elbows and helped her to her feet. Ivy nearly swatted his hands away. After all, she wasn't some weak court lady who needed a hand up every time she tripped over her silk shoes or a giant snake. Then she took a deep breath to clear her mind as well as her lungs, and decided rhat Sanval would reach down to anyone who needed help, not because that person was weak but just because that was what you did when you lived by the rigid rules of Procampur courtesy. Why not let him be polite for once—it would make the man happy—especially when her knees were wobbling and she was still seeing little stars dancing in front of her eyes.
Sanval did not even look winded. Just concerned.
"Ivy?" asked Sanval. "Are you bleeding? Your face, your hair?"
It was a trick of the torchlight. Ivy felt the dampness in her hair and a trickle down her face. It was wet, it was cold, and it was water, showering in rapidly increasing drops from the ceiling.
"Ivy!" Mumchance leaned far over the edge, head tilted to one side as he strained to see her. "We need to go! There's a lot of water coming down the tunnel."
"No, no, no!" Ivy could not prevent the childish sound of mutiny in her voice. The gods knew, she could take falling into a river, getting lost in a maze of dark tunnels, and fighting off kobolds, phantom fungus, and giant snakes. She could even take getting rescued by somebody who acted like he belonged in one of her mother's heroic ballads—though she meant to repay the favor as quickly as she could, because she did have her pride after all. Everything that had happened was just the sort of thing that could happen on the edges of a siege, when you were supposed to be doing a job and were getting lost instead in ruins that stretched on forever. She was serene about all of that. Most assuredly, she had handled anything that had
come before. But she absolutely and completely refused to be sanguine about drowning in the dark. If she wanted to panic now, she would panic.
In the climb out of the hole, pulling herself up the rope slowly, each stretch of Ivy's right arm caused twinges all down her snake-bruised body. Wiggles rode triumphant on her shoulder, barking directly in her ear when she scented Mumchance above them. As soon as Ivy was level with the top of the hole, the dwarf reached out and snagged the little dog, hugging her tight to his chest.
As she clambered out of the hole, Ivy calmed down a little and decided to wait until they were above ground before she threw the mother of all fits. Right now, she was going to get them out of this dismal, damp disaster of a situation.
Water glimmered in the torchlight, dripping down the walls and flowing from the direction of the old city baths. Right now it was barely deep enough to cover the soles of their boots, and most was pouring down into the hole in the passageway.
Ivy glanced at Gunderal. The little wizard shook her head, looking close to tears. "I just can't stop it," she said. "Maybe slow it down a little."
"Do what you can," Ivy said to Gunderal. The moment that Zuzzara and Sanval cleared the hole, she shouted, "Let's move!"
Taking the lead, she set off at a fast jog into the black unknown as the river continued to worm its way into the tunnels, water rising fast behind them.
Chapter Ten
Intent on fleeing the water gushing into the underground ruins, the Siegebreakers trotted at increasing speed through the black tunnels. Once again, to Mumchance's distress, they were going down, not up, and the way was broadening before them. The underground road was now wide enough to run three or even four abreast, and the angry mutter of the river continued to follow them.
"We have to go higher!" cried Mumchance, gesturing with his lantern and sending the shadows wildly swinging across the wall.
"Wonderful idea," panted Ivy as she lengthened her stride. "But which way?"
"There," said Mumchance, pointing at the dark entrance to a tunnel that branched off the main way.
"More tracks!" squealed Kid, ears flicking nervously, nostrils wide as he tried to scent possible danger. He stamped his hooves against the dirt. "Many feet, running past, my dear, and hobnail boots. Smoke ahead too!"
"He's right, Ivy." Gunderal was breathing hard and looking even paler than before. "I smell fire and magic."
"Maybe I should go ahead, in case of danger," Sanval started to suggest.
"No! We stay together. It's safer. No more lone rescues— not even from me," decided Ivy, straining to smell whatever danger had spooked Kid and Gunderal. Her human nose just reported damp stone and the old sour scent of air trapped too long underground. She saw nothing but blackness beyond the light of their torches and Mumchance's faithfully burning lantern. "It's probably just another burned part of the ruins. More ash and old spells."
"Water's running fast, Ivy." This came from Zuzzara, staring over their heads, looking back along the way that they had come. Her half-ore vision clearly showed her the rising level of the water moving down the ancient sewers.
"Then we run faster." To Sanval, she said, "We are good at running. You should have seen us clear that tunnel when the hogs started to explode." That twitched his worried expression into a half smile. Pleased to have distracted him from any rash lone heroics, Ivy led them into the new tunnel, shouting at the others to turn and go in this new direction. "Regular formation, single file!" she yelled. "Sanval, fall in with Zuzzara, help Gunderal if she needs it! Kid to the back, watch our rear! Mumchance, keep up and don't forget your sword! Everyone stay alert!"
They scrambled up the slope. The tunnel turned sharply left. As they hustled around the bend, Ivy heard the clash of fighting—nothing else sounded quite like that. And then she heard shouting. She ttied to turn back and warn the Siegebreakers to be quiet until they could assess the situation, but the momentum of the others behind her propelled her into the fight before she could shout a warning.
A man on fire, surrounded by hobgoblins and ores, stood in the middle of the fight. Ivy slid to a halt, flipping her sword out even before she came to a complete stop. Startled by the sight of the burning man, she blinked and looked again, almost too
dazzled by the flames to notice the ores and hobgoblins yelling at the strangely calm gentleman.
Unperturbed by the flames licking around his body, the wizard (for what else could he be?) leaned on a smooth metal crutch and spat out some arcane command. Squealing hobgoblins and shouting ores rushed the apparent cripple as a group, only to be deflected by the flames rising hotter and higher off the wizards cloak. The smell of singed hides filled the air, but it was definitely the acrid stink of well-roasted monster. Flames might be sprouting from the wizard's body, but it was his enemies who burned!
The wizard's attackers wailed, throwing up their arms to protect their faces from the flames. When they turned aside, they fell afoul of a giant pair of bugbears—all snarls and big muscles and rusty chains holding together well-worn black leather armor. The bugbears fought with glaives, old-fashioned spears with oak shafts and leaf-shaped blades on one end and rough knobs of iron on the other. The bugbears swung the huge glaives around them as if they had no weight at all, slicing through the stomach armor of a hobgoblin or an ore with the sharp end and then braining the creature with the round end.
The howling hobgoblins and ores backed away from the wizard and his bugbear guards. They rushed toward the tunnel, trying to escape out of the entrance that Ivy and the others had just stumbled through.
To avoid being trampled by the creatures, Ivy bent low into a defensive crouch, sword out in the right hand, torch still clutched in her left hand. Sanval settled naturally onto her left side while Zuzzara swung onto her right.
"I'll take the lead," shouted Ivy as she barreled forward, knocking hobgoblins and ores back into the room, pushing them toward the flaming wizard who frightened them so. At least with a burning man in the center of the room, there was
plenty of light. She could clearly see her opponents, and what she saw was trouble. Big, fat, well-seasoned fighters, with good armor and weapons, all bearing the black boar emblem of Fottergrim's horde.
"Oh blast and blast," said Ivy as she swung into the fight. They had stumbled into a dispute of Fottergrim's raiders. Didn't anyone stay above ground these days? Just what she did not need! And this was supposed to have been such an easy, quick job! Drop a wall, collect bags of gold, go home and fix the barn roof. She had a plan, and other people kept messing it up. Snarling louder than the bugbears, Ivy launched herself into the fight that she could not think how to avoid.
Her own torch made a lousy shield, and Ivy wished that she had her half-round buckler, that battered veteran of previous fights. But the buckler was propped up against the brassbound armor chest back at the camp, and wishes made even worse shields than torches. Copying Sanval's earlier trick with the snake, she thrust the torch toward the yellow eyes of a hobgoblin trying to sidle around her from the left. She set its shaggy red eyebrows on fire, and the thing ran screaming.
Once, several years ago, Ivy had studied swordplay. All the proper stances, the correct swings, the finesse of point versus edge, the elegant way to fight—the sort of thing that Sanval was doing at her side without even thinking about it. Her style in this fight was not like that. It was tavern basic—using the sword as much like a club to stun as like a pointed edged weapon. It was clumsy, it was nasty, and it was supremely satisfying to a woman warrior who was having an exceedingly bad day. Ivy charged into the fight, the heels of her boots banging on the floor, her long limbs swinging, her blonde braid whipping around her shoulders with every turn, her blue eyes glittering with fury and delight. Hobgoblins squeaked like baby pigs and tried to scramble out of her way. Ores yelled even
louder as they stumbled over their own big feet to avoid her. All were taller and much heavier than Ivy, but she was faster. She banged them on their round helmets and whacked them on their armored ankles. She cut high, she cut low, and she cut mean. She plowed into Fottergrim's troops like she meant to make each one personally pay for the absurdly horrible, rotten way that everything had turned out since that idiot camel had blundered into her tent and knocked her out of bed and made her miss breakfast.
Sanval and Zuzzara correctly settled into that important pace-and-a-half behind her that gave their rush into the room such nasty consequences to the enemy. What Ivy missed with sword and torch, Sanval skewered with style, or Zuzzara bashed with vigor.
As Ivy beat off one hobgoblin, only to see him brained by a bugbear coming up from behind him, she wondered just who that flaming wizard was. An enemy of Fottergrim? A good guy? A good guy with big, raggedy, nasty bugbear guards? Or were they all bad guys?
But there was too much happening all at once, and Ivy fell back on her training and experience. She stopped thinking and started hitting, and found the sound of her sword striking hobgoblins and ores was a most soothing sound. She swung slightly to the left, and Sanval and Zuzzara adjusted their step to her. It was like dancing with two partners, she thought, as she stepped lightly over an ore rolling on the ground and Sanval hopped over the same beast, instantly taking the proper position to protect her back.
Some of the ores, seeing the fight going so terribly against them, turned back to the flaming wizard, flinging down their weapons and dropping to their knees, crying for a truce; but a sphere of fire shot from the wizard's hand. Like some demonic toy, the flaming ball bounced twice against a hobgoblin
commander trying to whip the ores back to the fight, setting his fur on fire. The ball passed harmlessly over the bugbears stomping over their opponents with their heavy hobnail boots, before scorching half a dozen ores across their snouts. The hobgoblin commander rolled on the floor, trying to escape the mysterious sphere. The two bugbears knocked him back and forth between them with their glaives, much like a pair of cats batting mice from one paw to another. The wizard twitched a finger to the left, and the flaming sphere bounced left to fry more ores. He twitched a finger to the right, and the sphere flew to the right and set another hobgoblin blazing. Smoke filled the room, and that the wizard also controlled. With a small wind, the wizard whipped it into the faces of his attackers, so the creatures gasped and choked and dropped to the ground, smothered by the acrid fumes from their own burning comrades.
Fottefgrim's raiders were routed. As a body, they rushed to escape the fate of their choking, frying fellows. They burst around Ivy, Sanval, and Zuzzara, streamed past the rest of the startled Siegebreakers, and disappeared down the dark tunnel that led down to the river—out of the fire and into the flood.
"Oh, blast," said Ivy when she saw how spell after spell burst from the wizard's hands in rapid succession. "This is not good."
She looked around, hoping to see a clear exit. There was no way out that was not clogged with dying or dead hobgoblins and ores. More worrisome was the fact that the rest of her friends had followed her blindly into the room. Gunderal's violet eyes were round with shock at the easy burst of fire spells that came from the wizard.
"We need help," Zuzzara sputtered over her shoulder to her sister.
"You know I can't control fire!" Gunderal sobbed, her uninjured hand protectively crossed over the hand still resting in the sling.
"I don't mean to nag, sister," said Zuzzara as she punched an ore and then slung it over the heads of Gunderal and Mumchance to join its fellows, "but sometimes you can dampen down flames."
The black smoke still swirled around them. Zuzzara caught a lungful and coughed. At the sound of her sister's hacking distress, Gunderal's face turned even whiter. She muttered a spell, hissing out each word like an angry kitten. A swirl of damp but clean air, smelling pleasantly of evergreen trees and spring flowers, swept through the room. Zuzzara drew in a grateful breath of the healing mist, thumped the last standing ore over the head with her shovel, and gave her sister an enormous pointy-toothed grin.
"Knew you could do it," bellowed Zuzzara.
Gunderal acknowledged her with a weak smile and leaned more heavily against the wall. "That should have been stronger," she said, her voice rising barely above a whisper as she drew in her own deep breaths of the mist.
Noticing that the fighting had now completely stopped, Zuzzata added. "Hey, we did good, didn't we?"
Ivy almost agreed, but then she caught sight of Mumchance and Kid, both of whom still hugged the wall, flanking the more vulnerable Gunderal.
Mumchance looked as glum as a one-eyed dwarf could look—in other words well down the scale toward outright miserable—and all that could be seen of Wiggles was the tip of one quivering white ear poking out of Mumchance's pocket. But the expression on Kid's face worried Ivy even more. For the first time since she had plucked the little thiePs hand off her purse and slung him over her shoulder to carry him home, Kid
looked frightened. His head was pulled down into his shoulders, and his whole body was hunched over, as if he anticipated a blow or a beating.
Ivy glanced over her shoulder to see what terrified Kid so. She realized that Kid was staring at the flaming wizard still casually leaning on his big metal crutch. With an impatient snap of his fingers, the wizard plucked a scorched charm off his cloak and threw it to the floor. The flames springing from his clothes vanished.
The tall, thin man strode toward Ivy's group, confident and with no hesitation. The metal crutch under his left arm swung in perfect time with his legs and lent an odd and menacing thud to each step forward. Even slightly stooped, he still towered above all of them except Zuzzara. His face was young, but deeply lined; grooves of discontent ran from long nose to narrow lips.
He stared at them with absolute disdain and then smiled with the faintest upward tug of his closed lips. His yellow-green eyes narrowed with the type of pleasure usually seen in the face of a barnyard cat confronting a particularly plump baby bird.
"How interesting," the wizard said. "Toram's lost little pet goat and a pack of scruffy fighters, led by a fellow in such shiny armor that he has to come from Procampur. It is amazing what you find underground these days."
Chapter Eleven
In a soft whisper, Kid murmured, "Archlis." "Oh, by all the gods great and small," swore Ivy. The last person she wanted to meet was Fottergrim's personal spell-caster, the master of Tsurlagol's walls throughout the siege.
The wizard focused on Sanval, obviously taking the Procampur captain as their leader. The others he had looked over with a disinterested eye and immediately dismissed as unimportant. Ivy kept quiet, wanting to observe without being too closely observed.
"So what are you hunting in these ruins with Toram's god-sight goat?" Archlis repeated the odd phrase, gesturing with the tip of his metal crutch at Kid, who cringed away as though he expected it to spit fire at him.
"What do you think we seek?" Sanval answered question with question, his voice very steady and low, even as he took a half-step in front of Kid, sheltering the little thief behind his well-armored back.
"I am the magelord Archlis, the terror of Fottergrim's army," snapped the wizard. "Do not play games with me, little captain from Procampur."
"I am Sanval Nerias Moealim Hugerand Filao-Trious
Semmenio Illuskia Hyacinth Neme Auniomaro Valorous, a captain of Procampur's army." Sanval drew a deep breath after that recital. "I can say with complete honesty that I did not enter these ruins to capture you." Sanval's expression showed no more emotion on his handsome face than he had when confronted with Mumchance's leaping pack of mutts at the camp. His Procampur training in courtesy still held, even as the long-nosed Archlis sneered at him. "And I never play games with wizards."
"Wizard! Do you think that is all that I am? I, Archlis, who know the ancient secrets of Netheril. A magelord of the arcane arts. I could turn you to ash with a single word." Archlis half-raised his Ankh, favoring Sanval with the same close-lipped smile he had given when he recognized Kid. Sanval's hand tightened on his sword hilt.
"So," said Ivy, stepping forward before Sanval could provoke him further, "noble magelord, how can we help you?"
The magelord looked her up and down. He did not seem impressed. "Mercenary," said Archlis as a definition and not a compliment.
Ivy nodded. "Definitely. We did a little detour from the siege and ended up falling down here."
"Do not lie to me. You think"—Archlis pointed at Kid, who was still half-hidden behind Sanval—"that will lead you to the crypt. But I still have the book, and without it, you could not hope to find the crypt, not even with the power of that trinket on your glove."
Ivy glanced down at her gauntlets. The left one bore a battered silver oak leaf, a gift from her long-lost mother. The tarnished token was so much a part of her gear rhat she rarely gave it any thought. Odd that Archlis should notice so small and insignificant a magical item—just as the Pearl had. On his tabard hung a multitude of charms. Some were forged
from iron, others knotted from what looked like elf haii; still more were tarnished silver and yellowed bone. Below the shifting, clinking charms, Ivy saw arcane sigils and runes woven into the very cloth. His hands were studded with rings, and Ivy doubted that those trinkets were only charged with spells to dry out his boots. All in all, his charms and rings were a far more impressive display of magical protection and—most probably—magical destruction than her one lucky silver leaf. Still, Archlis had noticed the token, and he seemed thrown slightly off balance by Kid's presence in their group.
"Kid is very good at what he does. And I have my protections as well," said Ivy in the spirit of pure bluff. After all, if Archlis thought they were more powerful than they appeared, who was she to tell him that appearances were deceptive. And she would question Kid later about his supposed talents, just as soon as she was sure that Archlis was not going to sizzle their bones. "I could sell you his services. I could sell you mine. Cheap."
Kid gave an involuntary bleat and cringed farther away from Archlis. Sanval tried to say something, but Ivy stepped hard on his boot. When he started to protest, she gestured at Zuzzara, who clamped a large hand over his mouth.
Archlis looked amused at Sanval's angry eyes glaring at him ovei the big hand of the half-ore. "So, was this noble your prisoner, or is he your prisoner now?" Archlis asked Ivy.
"At the moment," Ivy explained, "he is our employer. But, as I said, for the right fee, and that fee does not have to be too high, we could terminate that contract. I would rather keep him alive. He is a powerful fighter and we have some .. . potions . . . that we can use to keep him under control. And, although from Procampur, his own character is none too noble, if you know what I mean." Zuzzara smiled her
sharp-toothed smile and nodded vigorously in support of Ivy's story. The others were silent—Sanval because he had no choice, and the rest because they trusted her. As always in such moments, she wondered if this were the day that she would be unable to live up to their expectations of her ability to lie her way out of a bad situation.
Having begun her story of how they came to be wandering in Tsurlagol's ruins, Ivy added a few more details for verisimilitude. "We were scouting for the Thultyrl and, since we did not make it back to the camp by... now, we would be subject to discipline. As would this man, who is already under probation for his gambling in the red-roof district and patronage of undesirable, um, females. He won't want to go rushing back to camp, not if there is a chance of treasure."
Behind her, Sanval choked, and Zuzzara whispered a hoarse "hush" in his ear. Ivy paused to see if Archlis was going to balk at any of the lies she was ladling out as fast as she could. The magelord frowned at the word "treasure," his eyes narrowing as he scanned the group again. His glance lingered longest on Kid and Mumchance. "You know how it is," Ivy concluded hastily. "Better gold in the purse today than a promise for tomorrow."
Archlis did not immediately dismiss her offer. In fact, he seemed more amused then doubting after his second careful examination of the group. He even snickered a little—a grating nasal sound—at Sanval still clutched in Zuzzara's protective embrace. "Armor or no armor, that one is no threat to me. Your offer is interesting. I have fewer servants than I deserve." Archlis gestured toward the bugbears, one of which was picking his teeth with a looted hobgoblin sword. "These have proved to be more fragile than I assumed."
"And the hobgoblins and the ores?" asked Ivy, waving one hand at the bodies littering the floor, still playing the role of
one callous mercenary intent on negotiating a good settlement for herself.
"They had orders to return me to the defenses of Tsurlagol. Which was a waste of my time. Fottergrim never understood. I could have made him a king of the Vast, after I retrieved my treasure," said Archlis with no lack of self-confidence. The lines running between his nose and mouth became more pronounced as the magelord brooded. "I persuaded the fool to come to Tsurlagol. Fottergrim was supposed to have made my access to the ruins easier, not more difficult."
"Except he decided to take the city, rather than just hang around the edges," guessed Ivy.
"Gruumsh must have driven him mad," Archlis replied, still obviously peeved. When he named the ore's war god, both the bugbears straightened up and made some gesture, to either appease the angry god or, more likely, to avoid Gruumsh s notice. "The temptation was too great for Fottergrim. Once he seized the city, he had no idea what to do and refused to listen to my suggestions. Hobgoblins and ores . .. Once they drink the taverns dry and eat all the meat in the butcher shops... Do they even pause to consider where the next meal is supposed to come from?"
Ivy asked in a sympathetic tone, "Down to eating the horses?"
"Yes. And what could be more foolish? How am I supposed to leave the city if they eat my carriage horses? I recommended that they eat their own mounts or, more practically, the citizens."
"And they refused? How surprising."
"Fottergrim muttered something about worgs tasting bad and wanting the citizens as hostages in case he needed to negotiate."
"Obviously, an unreasonable ore."
"A dim-witted buffoon, all stomach and no brains, like most ores. He threw away my advice and power."
"And the treasure beneath Tsurlagol?" She wondered what a magelord of his power could want in these looted ruins.
"I tell you, not even that creature's powers can find the crypt," said Archlis. Again he gestured toward Kid.
"Actually, we have never heard of..." began Gunderal, but stopped when Mumchance tapped her on the knee.
"Let Ivy do the talking," whispered the dwarf.
Archlis switched his attention to Mumchance. "You are a dwarf," stated the magelord.
"Thought that would be obvious." Mumchance peered up at Archlis in his usual tilt-headed squint so he could see the magelord clearly out of his one good eye.
"Do not be insolent. What is that?" Wiggles had popped her head out of Mumchance's pocket.
"My dog." Mumchance could be very taciturn with humans he did not like.
"Ah, your familiar. You are a dwarf wizard, then?"
"Not a wizard.'' The dwarf put up one hand to rub his fake eye, as if he were tired or trying to clear some grit out of it. Ivy knew what he was doing—preparing to pop out the gem bomb. She shook her head slightly and got an even slighter nod back from Mumchance. The room was too small, and the chances too great that the rest of them might be hurt by the blast. Besides, given that the magelord could apparently set himself on fire and not be burned, she doubted a gem bomb would cause Archlis any serious damage.
"Then it changes shape? Becomes a creature of unparalleled size and ferocity?" Archlis was still fixated on Wiggles, who was snarling at him with as much ferociousness as she could manage.
"No," said Mumchance. "Wiggles stays a dog. A small dog. My dog."
"Wiggles?" "That's her name."
Archlis was clearly baffled by someone wasting pocket space carrying anything as useless as Mumchance's fluffy white dog. It was an emotion that Ivy understood. Archlis abandoned his questions about Wiggles as profitless to himself. "Well, I may have a use for you—a dwarf in armor should be heavy enough." With that baffling remark, the magelord turned back to Ivy. "You will serve me. For now."
"All a matter of fee."
"I will decide the appropriate reward."
Ivy did not argue. Something about the way that Archlis kept fingering his Ankh and the bugbears kept backing up warned her that further discussion would not be beneficial. Pleased by her silence, Archlis continued. "A section of these ruins contains a simple trap in the floor, but it takes four at least to pass through safely. We made it through once, but we came upon a complication and were driven back. Then we ran into the hobgoblins."
"And there are only three of you now," pointed out Ivy, who knew that two bugbears and one magelord did not add up to four.
"There are only three," admitted Archlis, "due to the complication. Which I will explain after you take us through the trapped corridor. Four of you are all I need, but I will let the others live as part of your fee."
Archlis did not look like he was making idle threats. The stench of burned bodies still filled the chamber where they stood. Of course, they could refuse and fight. She knew the others were just waiting for a signal from her. Mumchance had even remembered to get a good grip on his sword instead of his second-best hammer. Zuzzara was swinging her shovel in idle little circles, drawing patterns in the dust as if she were paying
no attention at all to what was happening, and she had definitely loosened her grip on Sanval. Gunderal was looking pale but more determined; her good hand had the fingers spread wide to cast some water spell. But Kid was still cringing behind her and pulling on her weapons belt. Three sharp tugs—the little thiePs signal for danger.
Ivy knew that they could take the bugbears. But she did not know how fast Archlis could activate that Ankh. He looked just crazy enough to set off a firestorm in a small room, and who knew what protections he had for himself woven into that coat of multiple charms.
"So," said Ivy, "how far is the corridor with the funny floor?"
Chapter Twelve
Archlis led them out of the room and into another tunnel that continued to run uphill, much to Mumchance's relief. The dwarf was still muttering about hearing water moving behind them. Personally, Ivy was just glad to be out of that small room littered with the burned reminders of the magelord's power.
After several twisting turns, the magelord called a halt. "I must consult my book," he declared. "The rest of you sit. Be quiet."
The bugbears slumped against the wall and began hauling out various supplies from their packs. As Ivy knew from past campaigns, if there was ever a creature whose first love was food, and who hated to share, it was a bugbear. And normally she would not annoy anything that big and furry and none too bright. But she was hungry, and so were the rest of her crew. She swaggered over to the biggest bugbear, stuck out her chin, and got her nose as close to his as possible. Like most males, this maneuver made him nervous. He tried to back up, but he had no place to go. She leaned a little closer. He growled, and she snarled back, "Give me bread! Give me water!" in the only ore dialect that she knew.
He answered back in Common, "Don't have to."
"Have to!" barked Ivy, relieved to be able to drop out of Orcish and into a language that didn't make her throat hurt. Still, she didn't know how much Common this creature knew. She kept it simple. "Archlis said!"
"Did not!"
"Ask him." Ivy jerked a thumb at the magelord, his long nose already buried deep in his spellbook and muttering to himself. "But he won't be happy if you disturb him."
The bugbear rumbled something at his companion, and the other bugbear grumbled back. "Females," the creature said, very pointedly in Common so Ivy would understand, "are nothing but trouble." He handed over a bag of supplies.
"I would never disagree," replied Ivy with a grin as she turned on her heel and headed back to her friends.
On the top of the bag was fresh bread, still warm, as if it came from Tsurlagol's bakeries only that morning. Under that was some dried meat. Everyone grabbed at the bread as soon as they smelled it. Ivy shtugged and snatched her share. It had been a very long time since breakfast; or, in Ivy's case, since a few bites of dried biscuit.
Mumchance offered some of the unidentified meat to Wiggles. The dog whined and turned up her nose at it. After seeing the dog's reaction, the rest of them set the meat aside.
While they ate, Archlis carefully turned the crumbling pages of his scorched spellbook. He bent so close to the book that the tip of his narrow nose looked in danger of smudging the ink. The expression on his face grew more sour, as if the spellbook did not yield exactly the answers that he desired. Yet he handled the decaying parchment with judicious care. The bugbears sat with their backs to Archlis and their attention on the group, but nobody did anything overtly hostile.
Released by Zuzzara with a friendly pat to the back that
staggered him, Sanval chose to sit down next to Ivy. She took it as a good sign that he had not minded her more colorful comments about his character when she had been dickering with Archlis. For the first time since he had come to her tent that morning, Sanval stripped off his gauntlets to accept some bread and fresh water from Ivy. She passed the food and drink over to him with a slightly apologetic smile. His own look lightened a little as he took the bread from her. When he took her peace offering, she noticed his big hands bore the usual scars across the knuckles and the backs of his fingers that came from sword practice. Even with wooden weapons, cuts were a common hazard; and no matter how good a cleric a house employed, not everything healed without a trace. Ivy's own hands had a similar pale network of white scars across her skin.
"Why was Archlis interested in that?" said Sanval, reaching out and touching the small silver oak leaf worked into the cuff of Ivy's left glove. Her gloves were stuffed, as usual, through her belt.
"Harper token. I told you my mother was a bard," she said with an affectionate glance at her mother's last gift. She still remembered the sting of the wind against her cheeks as she stood on the dock, watching her mother's ship sail away. Over the wind and the sailors' shouts, she had heard her mother's cries of, "Farewell, farewell, I will return." She remembered how warm the token had felt in her hand and how tightly her father's hands had grasped her shoulders as they watched her mother wave good-bye.
She tapped the little silver leaf. "This gets me free beer in an amazing number of places."
Sanval looked a little disappointed at her answer.
"No, unfortunately, it is not much of spell. Just a tiny bit of extra luck, my mother said. It does keep me from losing whatever it is attached to, which is why I sewed it onto the
glove. I hate losing my gloves. Of course, it only keeps one glove with me at all times. So I replace the other one quite frequently. I should have sewn it on my cap. I miss that cap." She ran her hand across the top of her head, causing more short bits of blonde hair to escape her braid and trail across her face. She pushed them back with impatient, dusty fingers, ignoring Gunderal gesturing behind Sanval's back with one of her own delicate shell combs. They were in the middle of an underground ruin, surrounded by bugbears, and essentially held prisoner by an unfriendly magelord. Ivy was not about to let Gunderal rebraid her hair now, even if it did give her fussy friend fits to see her braid come undone. Ivy let Gunderal braid her hair once a tenday, after she had washed her hair and bathed, and that was enough as far as Ivy was concerned. If she listened to the vain little wizard's lectures on personal hygiene, she would be bathing every day and twice on holidays.
With a sigh, Sanval pulled off his metal helmet and ran his own hand across his hair. Ivy checked with a sideways glance. All his curls looked very washed and polished. He probably did bathe once a day, and then let his servants clip and comb his hair into that regulation cut that all of Procampur's officers favored for this particular war. Yet that one curl stood defiantly out of line with its fellows. Ivy smiled at the curl's crooked gallantry, and Sanval gave her an inquiring look. She did not enlighten him.
"I thought the charm on your glove was something that we could use against Archlis. He seemed disturbed by it," Sanval said.
Ivy shook her head. "It's not much of charm. Won't do anything spectacular. Besides, Archlis has a dozen or more charms sewn on that coat of his that are certainly more powerful than this. And look at his hands—a magic ring on each hand. Those are probably protections and spells too."
"But you must have more magic than that," said Sanval, tapping the token again.
"Zuzzara's ring, but we used that already. Gunderal's potions, which we lost in the fall."
"Armor? Weapons?"
"Mumchance has full plate with some extra protection hammered in, but he doesn't wear it in the summer. It is too hot, he says, and that's why he just has the chain mail today. All of us have charms against injury from falls, but as you can tell from Gunderal's arm, they are not too powerful." She thought about mentioning Mumchance's fake eye, but the secrets that Sanval did not know, he could not let slip to others. Archlis did not seem to be paying any attention to them, but wizards could have ears and eyes in the backs of their head, sometimes quite literally. Better to appear more harmless than they were, especially when they did not have that much magic to spare.
"But weapons. Magic swords? Spears?"
"Do you see any of those things on us? Zuzzara's shovel is most firmly unenchanted. My sword is just that—a sword. Good balance, keen edge, no spells. Mumchance's sword is the same. Better balance than mine, being forged by dwarves and all, but no spells of smiting. In fact, he usually forgets he is carrying it and uses one of his hammers instead. Gunderal never carries weapons, because she usually can cast spells or use her potions, when she hasn't broken all the potion bottles. Kid, do you have anything magical?"
"No, my dear. Two sharp little knives, but that is all." Kid had pitched his voice loud enough to carry to where Archlis was sitting. Good, thought Ivy, he has figured it out—do not give Archlis any reason to be nervous. Kid had flipped open the collar of his leather tunic to display the two needle-thin blades neatly sheathed there. Sanval seemed disappointed. Of course, he did not know that the stilettos were deadly in Kid's
hands. The litde thief could throw with frightening speed and accuracy when he wanted to. Kid's knives also had the excellent advantage of being able to double as lock picks on the cruder sort of lock. And, of course, being Kid, he had not shown all his knives. He carried another tucked in the back of his breeches. Gods only knew how he kept from slicing his furry little tail off. Of course, he kept that tucked away out of sight most of the time too.
"I thought you would have more magic," said Sanval.
"Why did you think that?"
"Because in the red-roof district..." Sanval stopped at Ivy's whistle of surprise and went a little pink across his cheeks. One of the bugbears glanced over at them, shrugged, and went back to eating something that dripped unpleasantly.
"So you do talk to the red-roof tavern girls. I wondered how you knew the end of that song."
"Everyone goes to a red-roof tavern," Sanval admitted, "when they are young. To hear the stories. You know, about the dragons, and the adventurers, and the great deeds done in the rest of the world. But in all the stories, people like you ... They always own many items of magic that they use to defeat their foes. Great and terrible weapons of power are carried by all the mercenaries. That is what they say in the camp."
"You should never believe camp gossip," said Kid, reaching past Sanval to snag another piece of bread and stuff it into his cheek like a berrygobbler.
"Sound advice. What they always leave out in the ballads and the camp gossip is that magic costs, and red-roof adventurers like me rarely can afford much." Ivy looked at Sanval, a man who could afford to bring three horses to a siege camp, along with the necessary servants. He wore full half-plate armor, forged just for him, properly fitted and certainly kitted underneath with leather, silk, cotton padding, and whatever
else was deemed necessary for his comfort. He probably even owned more than one shirt although she asked him just to make sure.
"I brought twelve shirts with me," he replied.
"I have two, one clean and one not," she said, but he did not look enlightened. She gave him a basic lesson in economics, the mercenary version of economics. "Magic costs. Gold. Coin. Gems. It takes wealth to buy the best spells and best enchanted items. We do all right, but we never make that much. And what we earn goes back to the farm. We made a promise to each other—that was what we would do."
"But he has magic," said Sanval, nodding toward Archlis.
"Because he is a wicked wizard!"
"Magelord, my dear," said Kid. "He stole that title from my master Toram, when he took Toram's book and Ankh."
"Magelord, magician, whatever he prefers to call himself, I would wager he's not trying to pay for a working farm, with vinestock that needs replacing, and a mule that deliberately goes lame when it doesn't want to haul the wagon (and nobody will let me turn into shoe leather), and more dogs and cats than you can count—or feed—because somebody is always dragging home some poor stray. I will not even try to account for the many expenses of an ill wyvern that ended up destroying our barn roof." Ivy subsided. There was no use trying to explain her problems to a man who could afford to bring twelve shirts to a siege camp and had probably never in his life had to sit up all night on a roof beam with a wyvern vomiting some type of acidic sludge.
"I would prefer your farm to any wizard's wonders," said Sanval, and he sounded sincere in his statement. "But I still wish that you had more magic, like that magelord's charms."
"Do not forget his Ankh," whispered Kid. "That is a weapon paid for by murder."
"Ankh?"
"That," said Kid, pointing at the metal pole that Archlis leaned against. It was topped by a smooth loop of metal and a crossbar of the same.
"I though it was a crutch," said Ivy.
Kid shook his head sadly. "No, it is the Ankh of Fire that he stole from my master."
"That is a rather large ankh," said Ivy, eyeballing the length of the thing. "I thought ankhs were little things that priests wore on their belts."
"This Ankh was forged for a giant and casts the most terrible and powerful spells. It took Toram years to find the tomb where it was hidden."
"What type of spells?"
"Fire spells."
"What sort of fire spell?" Her father had hated and feared fire as much as any tree in the forest.
"Many and many, my dear," said Kid, his ears drooping down and back, almost flat and hidden among his curls. "Enough to burn us all. He does not bluff when he claims such power."
"That settles it," Ivy said to Sanval. "You have to stifle any objections to an alliance with Archlis. You did notice how quickly he disposed of those hobgoblins and ores," she continued when Sanval said nothing.
"But he is the sworn enemy of Procampur," protested Sanval.
"We are his enemies," agreed Ivy in soothing tones. What did it take to make one man in shiny armor to see reason? "And there ate more of us, but does he look perturbed? That means he thinks he can beat us and, given the size and the number of fireballs that he was tossing off the walls of Tsurlagol over the last tenday, I think he can too."
"He won't dare try a fireball in here," said Gunderal,
catching the end of their discussion. "These tunnels are too narrow. He would burn himself."
When the others looked skeptical, Gunderal said with a huff, "Just because I can't do fire spells does not mean that I never studied them."
Zuzzara shook her head, setting her braids swinging and the iron beads on the ends clicking together. "What do you mean?"
"Flames spread, just like water! Simple enough for you, big sister?"
"Temper, tempei," replied the half-ore. "You should eat something. You are getting cranky, little sister."
Gunderal statted to reply and then obviously thought better of it. She tore off a small bit of bread and chewed dainty but deliberate bites. Zuzzara smiled to see her sister follow her advice.
"What about that sphere spell?" asked Mumchance. "That fire chased those hobgoblins and ores precisely enough."
"For all those reasons, we are not going to get into a fight that we cannot win and will not gain us anything," Ivy emphasized to Sanval. "Don't play the hero."
"You always say that," said Sanval in a sharper tone than he usually used.
"Because I know what heroics can bring." A drowned mother, a father so torn by grief that he would rather be wood than human. But how could she explain that to a man raised in Procampur, who thought the world was built on straight, narrow, and well-ordered lines. One who believed you could define people by the color of their roof tiles?
"I will attack him alone," decided Sanval, apparently forgetting that she was supposed to be the captain and the one giving the orders. She had known that was going to happen— she had just known it. "Then you will have time to escape," the
silver-roof noble concluded with a pleasant smile.
"And do you think that you would survive such an attack?"
"That does not matter." Sanval sounded happier than she had ever heard him, which was very bothersome to her peace of mind.
"What is the Procampur obsession with rushing in against all odds and getting yourself killed?" asked Ivy. She did not mean to sound harsh, but she did not want to fret about Sanval doing something suicidal. She had so many other things to worry about. "That is as idiotic as your city's ban of the Thieves Guild."
"What is wrong with our ban of the Thieves Guild?" said Sanval, distracted by the sudden criticism of the rules of his beloved city, which was exactly what Ivy had wanted.
"The ban on the Thieves Guild is unnatural, in my opinion," Ivy said, warming to her argument on why Procampur's citizens, especially the one sitting next to her, lacked basic good sense. "It is the same as expecting all the citizens in an entire city to come to an agreement to be honorable and deal fairly with others and not steal their goods." 1
"You would prefer to be robbed as you walked down the streets?"
"Of course not."
"Or to be allowed to rob others."
"Not me personally, at least not friends and family. But governments and rulers are somewhat stingy and should probably be encouraged to share the wealth at times." j
"So you are willing to rob others as long as you do not \ know them."
"And they can afford it. Never steal from the poor, they don't have anything worth taking." She waited for some response. Sanval's features had settled back into the impassive, slightly stern expression that she knew so well. He did not speak. "That
was a joke. But, honestly (or dishonestly if you prefer), thieves who are ruled by Thieves Guilds avoid stealing too much too close to home. City officials supplement their pay with some nice bribes, and the world rolls on. Procampur has to be the only city to take the quaint view that all its visitors, as well as its citizens, should be free to wander wherever they want in the city without having their purses cut of their pockets picked."
"And does that make our quaint view wrong, because it is not true in other cities?" A touch of acid stung beneath his words. And if Sanval's straight spine were any stiffer, Mumchance could have used it as a level. Worst of all, Sanval had gone from his impassive face to that straight-down-the-nose stare that he must have learned in the nursery beneath his mansion's silver roof. It was precisely the look of rebuke that his ancestors must have been giving red-roof adventurers like herself for generations.
Ivy could see a large philosophical hole opening before her—one that probably had a snake at the bottom of it. Which was confusing, because she knew that she had a winning argument when she had started out. A quick visual survey of her friends showed them all sitting there, resolutely silent, and waiting to see how she was going to finish the debate. She grimaced at the lack of verbal verification from those that she had expected to agree with her. Mumchance stared back with a very clear "you dig yourself out of this one" look. Zuzzara and Gunderal were leaning forward, Gunderal fluttering her eyelashes in some type of signal that puzzled Ivy. Even Kid, that hypocritical thief, looked disapproving of her argument. Wiggles just wagged her tail, obviously hoping that Ivy would shut up and somebody would feed the cute white dog sitting at their feet.
"Perhaps we could just agree that getting yourself killed is not going to help anyone, even if it is the most honorable thing
to do," said Ivy, returning to the point that she had wanted to make.
"I will attempt no action that would endanger any of you," promised Sanval, replacing his helmet very slowly and very straight upon his head.
Only Ivy seemed to notice that he made no promises about his personal safety.
Chapter Thirteen
Once he was done with his book, Archlis neatly packed it away into a pouch dangling from his belt. Kid watched him from behind Ivy's back.
"So he still has it." Kid's voice was soft, just loud enough for her to hear. "What?" "Toram's book." "And who was Toram?"
"A bad man. An evil man." Ivy had never heard Kid, whose own morality was rather questionable, state his disapproval so flatly. "But a learned one. He spent his life robbing the secrets of others."
"So are there maps in that book?" The tunnels were twisting round and round. As good as Mumchance's sense of direction was underground, Ivy would have loved to have a map that showed clearly where they were in Tsurlagol's ruins and, more importantly, where they could get out of Tsurlagol's ruins. "Could you steal it?'
Kid fingered the knives beneath his collar. "He has charms to protect him against theft," he reluctantly whispered. "He would have to be distracted and even then ... I am sorry,
, my dear, I do not know if I can do it."
Ivy gave, one of his horns a friendly pull. "Don't worry. There's bound to be some other way to get out of here. I have a plan or two in my back pocket."
"For just such an emergency," Kid said, looking more cheerful. "Well, I will watch and wait for my chance. For I do not like that man, my dear." And he continued to watch the magelord's back, fingering his knives in a thoughtful way.
Marching two by two through increasingly narrow tunnels, the group followed Archlis. The magelord strode in front, periodically lighting a finger the way another man would light a candle so he could better see some arcane symbol etched in the walls. He never hesitated, although they passed a myriad of tunnels branching away into the darkness. Of course, Archlis had come this way once before. Still Ivy had to admire a man who remembered directions after having dealt with and avoided some of the most devious traps of place.
One bugbear walked in front of them, and another walked behind them. So far there had been no opportunity for escape.
"We've turned east again," Mumchance said with the certainty of an elderly dwarf far underground. Wiggles once again rode in his pocket, sleeping off her late lunch. Everyone had slipped her part of their bread because she had looked so sad and hungry. Now the dog was so full, she could barely waddle.
"Back toward the city? The city wall that we want?" Ivy asked.
"Closer than we were." Mumchance fingered his fake eye. "We could still use our little treasure against them."
"And kill whom? The one in front or the one in back?" hissed Ivy. "You can't get them all." She turned back to her wizard, the one that couldn't light fires but could definitely feel water. "Where's the river?"
"Still running strong behind us," Gunderal whispered. "I can feel it flooding the tunnels."
"There is something else too. Something old and magical behind us," said Kid, one ear swiveling forward and one back.
"Oh, do you feel it too?" A relieved Gunderal bent down and gave him a quick hug. "I could not figure out what I was smelling, and it was giving me such a headache—I thought it might be a reaction to my own spell."
"What are you talking about, sister?" asked Zuzzara. "Are you ill?"
"I'm fine. But whatever the magic is, it is giving me such an itch in my nose. I feel like I'm going to sneeze, but I can't. It's driving me crazy."
Zuzzara pulled a large silk handkerchief out of her waistcoat pocket. "Blow."
Gunderal blew, delicately of course, and sighed. "Oh, that's better. I felt my ears pop."
Ivy chewed her lower lip and thought about a possible magical threat following them. Well, it was not treading on her heels like the bugbear, so she decided to ignore it for now.
"If we are heading back toward Tsurlagol," said Zuzzara, who was always the most optimistic of the Siegebreakers (as long as her sisters Mimeri and Gunderal were happy), "then maybe we can find our wall again. The one that we are supposed to knock down."
"The Thultyrl gave us two days," Ivy said. "And I don't think that we have even finished out half of the first day." She thought about the number of fights, wrong turns, and other disasters that had befallen them. "Well, maybe more than half."
Sanval answered softly, "The Thultyrl may not wait. I did not go back to the camp. They would have investigated and found your tunnel collapsed."
"And presume that we are dead?"
"Or unable to complete your task."
"What will they do then?" Ivy asked.
"Charge the wall without your help."
"Wonderful thought." Now she had to worry about an entire troop of Procampur's finest trying to scale the western wall and overrun Fottergrim's ores in the holdings at the top. Even without Archlis opposing them with his fire spells, it would not take much to turn the charge into a rout.
"Well, this looks like trouble," said Ivy.
A pair of oaken doors blocked the way. The lock had been burned open, and the blasted doors hung half off their hinges.
"Waste of magic," Mumchance said when he saw the condition of the doors.
"He has magic to waste, dear sir," replied Kid with a significant wink toward Archlis. The magelord stood behind them, flanked by his bugbears, and was obviously waiting for them to survey the room beyond.
Peeking through the ruined doors, they could see a corridor with a checkered floor made from huge stone slabs. Some had a fine cross-hatch pattern cut into them. Others were marked with a spiral of stars, and still others with wavy lines. A few squares were polished smooth and blank.
"Earth, sky, ocean," said Mumchance. "And that which we find on the other side of death."
"Nothing," said Ivy, because this was an old lesson, one that her mother had taught when she had taken Ivy hunting for treasure in the wild. She had seen such patterns in ruins before. They invariably led to a tomb or crypt. "It's a path to the dead."
"A bit more dead than usual, my dears," pointed out Kid.
For the floor was littered with the bodies of hobgoblins and ores, a ragged and rather squashed looking troop. Their lifeless, muscular bodies were limp, their blank yellow eyes staring at nothing, their hide and rough hair poking out from breaks in their once bright armor. Shields were as flat as plates, and swords smashed.
"More of Fottergrim's?'' asked Ivy.
"They pursued us through this section," said Archlis, "but they did not know the secret of the squares. The ceiling crushed them as it does anyone who does not know the pattern."
At this pronouncement, they all glanced up. The ceiling was low and gleamed with a spectral light, clearly showing a lattice of iron suspended above the floor. A long pointed spike was welded to the corner of each tiny square formed by the ironwork. Some of the spikes were clearly blunted by repeated poundings on the stone floor below. Others still dripped with bits and pieces of the unfortunates who had passed below without the knowledge of the floor's pattern. Chains ran from the lattice into square holes cut into the stone ceiling above.
"The floor is constructed in such a way that if four people move across the squares in unison, the trap stays in the ceiling. Should one make a misstep, the trap comes crashing down. I have the pattern here," Archlis withdrew his spellbook from his pouch and unfolded a page twice as large as the book from its center. The parchment was blotched with terrible stains, but a series of gray-brown lines and rust red symbols could be seen on one side.
"You and you," said Archlis, pointing at Sanval and Zuzzara, "should go first, as you appear to be about the same weight. Then"—he nodded toward Ivy and Mumchance— "you will follow. You must step exactly as I say."
"And then what?" asked Ivy.
> Archlis pointed with the head ofhisAnkh to the doors visible at the opposite end of the room. "There is a lever on the left-hand side. Turn it three times to the right. The lock handle must be turned delicately and correctly, but if done right, the trap will remain locked long enough for the rest of us to cross."
"Then it resets itself?" asked Mumchance.
"Yes. There is no way to lock it open permanently. But it takes some time for it to reset. After we had left this room, Fottergrim's trackers were able to cross it safely when they followed us. We eluded them in the maze that it is beyond those doors, but were forced back. We locked the trap from that side when we crossed the room again so more than half the trackers escaped with their lives and continued to hunt us into the room where you found us."
"So when the ceiling comes down, it comes down fast," said Mumchance with a speculative note in his voice. "And it probably goes up very slowly."
"Whether it is fast or slow does not matter. I hold the pattern here. We used it to cross once before. Once you have reached the other side, the dwarf will turn the lock and secure the room as I have instructed. That should be within his skills," said Archlis. Mumchance snorted. "Then we will follow you," continued Archlis. "Now take one step right, one step forward, and one step left, and repeat that pattern until you reach the other side."
"It sounds like a court dance," said Sanval, readying himself to cross by the usual straightening of his helmet and a quick check of his weapons.
Ivy looked across the room and at the corpses that littered many of the squares. She laid one hand on Sanval's arm to keep him from stepping out. "But there are extra bodies on the floor, and that will make it harder. Hate to trip over someone else's feet as we glide along."
"Or someone's severed head, more likely," said Mumchance, eyeing the carnage.
"Can we do it?" questioned Zuzzara. "If one is off count or stumbles ..."
"All of us die," said Ivy, turning to Archlis. "I don't like this."
The magelord adjusted his grip on his Ankh, one rusty ring on his hand grating unpleasantly against its smooth metal surface. "If you refuse, you will die faster. Then the others can choose which danger is greater—the floor ahead or myself. I only need four to cross and turn the key."
"If he is so clever, why can't he break the trap's spell?" Gunderal whispered.
"It is not a spell," Kid whispered back. "Do you feel any magic here?"
Gunderal's pretty face smoothed into that look of perfect serenity that meant she was feeling along the Weave of magical forces. She slowly shook her head.
Mumchance nodded in agreement with Kid. "It's all mechanical."
Ivy backed away from Archlis, fingering the hilt of her sword. Sanval also had a firm grip on his weapon. Archlis did not look worried, which was worrisome. The bugbears were a bit too relaxed as well, just leaning on their glaives and watching with interest. They obviously felt no threat.
"Waste of time," said Mumchance, who had been studying the floor and then the ceiling while carrying on a whispered conversation with Kid. He squinted at the little thief, who nodded very firmly this time. "All that hopping back and forth. Kid, get ready. Come up here, Zuzzara."
"No," said Archlis, "it must be two of almost equal weight who start the pattern."
"Don't care about the pattern." Mumchance scratched
Wiggles's head as he contemplated the room. "Zuzzara, how far can you throw a dead hobgoblin?"
"Same as a live one," she said with grin. "Halfway across the room without much trouble."
"Should work. Let's get you a little help. Hey, you, big guy," Mumchance said, crooking a finger at the nearest bugbear. "Hook me a hobgoblin with that stick of yours. The little one near the door will work fine. He's almost intact."
The bugbear growled at Mumchance, but he went to the threshold of the room. The hairs on the back of the bugbear's neck were clearly visible just below the line of his battered helmet and just as clearly standing straight out. The bugbear muttered and grumbled, very softly in the back of his throat, as he looked beyond the room to the doors on the far side. Still, he obeyed Mumchance's orders, ignoring the scowling magelord. The bugbear leaned through the doors, carefully keeping his feet out of the room and off the carved pavement. He thrust his glaive into the nearest hobgoblin and dragged it back through the door.
"You get one end. Zuzzara, you grab the other," instructed Mumchance. "Kid, get ready to jump."
Kid crouched in the center of the door. Zuzzara and the bugbear swung the body twice and then sent it sailing over Kid's head and into the room. It fell heavily on the tiles. With a screeching of gears above the ceiling, then the clash of unwinding chains, the ironwork grid dropped from above them and crashed to the floor, again impaling the dead hobgoblins and ores.
"Go! Go!" shouted Mumchance at Kid.
Kid leaped lightly on top of the ironwork and raced across the grid. A ponderous tick-tick of gears sounded in the ceiling. "It's starting up again," yelled Mumchance. Kid spurted ahead and dropped in front of the doors. He grasped the lever and
twisted it savagely around to the right. There was a grinding noise that came from the ceiling and then a distinct sproing sounded through the room. The spiked grid remained where it had landed on the floor.
"See," said Mumchance, hoisting himself on top of the ironwork and strolling straight across. "Much easier to break it than to go dancing across the floor."
If the magelord was pleased, it did not show in his scowl. The bugbears looked on, expressionless, but then Ivy did not expect any sort of expression on a bugbears squashed furry face.
When they reached the far side of the room, Ivy said to the dwarf, "That was just too easy. What terrible thing happens next, do you suppose?"
"Look, these old tomb builders weren't exactly mechanical geniuses," said Mumchance. "Well, one or two were good at it, and the others just copied them. I would bet you a good night's sleep that the gears are rusted out, the chains have weak links, and a couple more drops would have broken the whole thing. But the most delicate gears are always in the lock mechanism. The magelord was right. It's all about balance and counterbalance, the right pressure at the right time. Archlis had already forced it open twice today, so it was sure to be a bit bunged up."