Crypt of the Moaning Diamond (10 page)

“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.”

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.