Crypt of the Moaning Diamond

by Rosemary Jones

  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 di
dn’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-orcs, 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-orc 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-orc 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-orc 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.