Crypt of the Moaning Diamond (17 page)

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.”

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 spellcaster, 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 godsight 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