Crypt of the Moaning Diamond

by Rosemary Jones

  “Unless you know how to kill destrachans, keep your voices down,” Ivy finally intervened. “We need to think of some place that we could ambush the creatures.”

  “Those creatures hunt by sound more than anything else,” Zuzzara said, peering through one archway into the chamber beyond.

  “According to Archlis, they are blind,” Ivy agreed. “And you saw the size of those ears.”

  “So what if we make a lot of noise and draw them into a narrow place like this,” Zuzzara suggested. “Someplace where we could get above them. That might help.”

  They followed Zuzzara into a circular chamber with stairs running in spirals along the walls to higher openings. In the center of the room stood a small fountain with a trickle of water coming out of its cracked marble spouts. The water was very cold to the touch.

  “There’s our river,” said Gunderal with satisfaction. “Or a branch of it at least.”

  “Forcing its way in through the old pipes first,” said Mumchance. “The dwarves built well when they built this city, every time that they built this city.”

  “Strange place,” said Ivy, looking around the tower of ancient Tsurlagol.

  Gunderal ran up a few stairs and rested her hand against the wall. “It is some kind of watchtower, sunk by that weird earth magic that I’ve been feeling throughout the ruins. Remember the mosaic back in the bathhouse?”

  “Odd or not, Zuzzara is right,” said Mumchance. “It’s a good place for a trap.”

  Zuzzara shrugged. “I may be ugly, but I’m not dumb.”

  The old joke made them all laugh a little, and then glance uneasily over their shoulders as the laughs bounced around the room.

  Mumchance climbed up the stairs after Gunderal, peering here and there through the openings, swinging his lantern before him. Wiggles stopped before one doorway and let out one small sharp bark. Mumchance took a look and then called back down the stairs. “There’s another tunnel. Looks like it runs straight back the way that we came, just higher up.”

  “Higher is good,” said Ivy, watching the ancient fountain that bubbled in the center of the room.

  “Now we need to attract the destrachans lower down,” said Mumchance. “So the water covers them before it covers us.”

  “That was what I was thinking,” Ivy said.

  “Do you want me to use my eye?” The dwarf fingered his fake eye as if he were going to pop it out of his head. “An explosion should bring the beasts quick enough.”

  “Save that eye. We may need it later. I have a better idea,” said Ivy with a wicked grin. “Everyone needs to get to higher ground first. Gunderal, go up to that platform where Mumchance is. Get as close to the exit as you can; you may need to run quickly.”

  Gunderal climbed to the ledge where Mumchance stood.

  “Maybe you should call from inside that tunnel,” Ivy suggested. The sound carried perfectly up to Gunderal on the ledge, but she shook her head.

  “I need to see the water, Ivy, just to keep my spell anchored in this room.”

  “All right. Zuzzara, do you have that rope we found earlier?”

  “Wound around my waist,” the half-orc affirmed. “Do you need it?”

  “Tie one end to my belt and get ready to haul me up when I yell. Now I am going to wait for the beasts to get here.” Ivy cut off their anticipated arguments. “No, I stay on the floor here. I’m the bait. I’m going to keep them down here, and Gunderal is going to get that river to rise faster, so it’s over their heads before they know what is happening.”

  “But what about you?” worried Zuzzara.

  “I’ve got a few tricks,” said Ivy, straightening the red leather belt around her waist so she could easily reach the silver buckle. “And if my tricks don’t work, you are going to haul me up like a fish on line. As fast as you can.”

  “All right,” said Zuzzara.

  “And how are you going to get the beasts to come to you?” queried Mumchance.

  “I am going to sing!”

  “Oh, Ivy.” Gunderal shuddered, and even Mumchance winced once they realized what she was intending to do. Both of them were fairly musical. Zuzzara, who had inherited her orc mother’s taste for music (which consisted of exactly no opinion at all), just bobbed her head in a quick nod of agreement and began unwinding the rope around her waist. She started to thread one end through Ivy’s belt.

  “Don’t tie the rope to that skinny red belt,” Ivy instructed her. “Around my weapons belt. I don’t want to pull the other one off.” Zuzzara tied the knot where Ivy had pointed.

  “Ivy, are you sure about this?” Gunderal asked, leaning perilously out so she could see her friend.

  “Absolutely. Kid and I found a little extra magic back in the tunnels that is going to help.” Ivy pulled off her gloves and secured them in her weapons belt. She placed her bare fingers on the winged serpent clasp of the magic belt that she had retrieved from the floating corpse. If it worked as it had before, she should be able to float right out of the creatures’ reach.

  “Wait one moment,” Gunderal said, leaving the ledge and coming down the stairs with a quick patter of little feet across the stone steps. “Does anyone have a candle?”

  “I don’t need a candle,” Ivy said, who had a lit torch in one hand and her sword in the other.

  “But I do. Zuzzara, light this for me.” Gunderal pulled one of the candles that they had looted from the bugbear out of her robes and handed it to her sister.

  After Zuzzara had lit the candle, Gunderal held her hand beneath its drips until her fingertip was covered with wax. She reached out, touched Ivy, and said, “That should do.”

  “What’s that for?” Ivy asked.

  “We know the destrachans hunt by sound, but how can we know if they have a sense of smell? Perhaps not, but still, I think you will be safer without any smell.”

  “I have heard of wizards removing odor from smelly beasts and dead bodies, but come on, Gunderal, I don’t stink that bad!” Ivy objected.

  “Most beasts can pick up any scent, no matter how small, and now you have none at all.”

  Ivy grinned. “Great! I’ll never have to bathe again!”

  Gunderal said sadly, “It’s a weak spell, Ivy. It will only last a short while.”

  Ivy shrugged. “I plan to finish those monsters quickly.”

  “Well, if you’re actually going to sing, that should drive them mad,” said Mumchance. The dwarf scooped up Wiggles and put the little dog in his pocket. He tugged on Gunderal’s hand. “Come on, girl, you need to call that river.”

  As they climbed higher on the stairs, Zuzzara followed them, paying out rope as she went.

  “Oh, how I am going to sing!” Ivy said to her friends’ retreating backs. “I am going to sing every red-roof ballad that I’ve learned this summer. If those beasts are as sensitive to sound as Archlis said, they should come rushing to devour me before I get to the first chorus!”

  Above Ivy, Gunderal began chanting, her call to the river echoing around the room The smell of water filled the air. Ivy waited until the river began to bubble faster through the broken spouts of the fountain, filling the basin and frothing over her boots. Then she stood with elbows out and fists on her waist, tilted her head back, took a deep breath, and started to sing.

  “Procampur men are deadly dull, but Procampur girls are fancy loves.” Ivy had never quite figured out all the more obscure slang in the chorus—a rousing ditty about ladies who switched their roof tiles to suit their loves—but Sanval had blanched the first time that he had heard her sing it and muttered something about “duels are being fought for lesser insults.” Now Ivy pitched her voice loud and strong, to send the echoes clashing through the carved rock of the chamber. The sound reverberated even better than singing at the top of her lungs in the bathhouse back at the farm (a favorite trick for keeping the place all to herself and avoiding certain people fussing about whether or not she was rinsing her hair out properly).

  Gunderal continued to
call upon the river to rise. She stood on the ledge above Ivy, her hands held out. Thin glittering strands of light bounced around the chamber, shimmering across her blue-black cloud of hair. Her violet eyes shone in her delicate face. As her gentle genasi mother had taught her so long ago, Gunderal sang the song of water. The lightning scent of the storm became interwoven with the cool, sweet smell of rain falling from the sky to the dusty earth below, the darker tang of an old river carrying that same rain through the heart of a mountain, and—not too far away—the pull of the sharp salt scent of the sea. She sang about how the sea’s rich perfume could lure the river out of its old meandering ways and send it hunting, like an elderly blundering hound trailing a fox’s scent, into the tunnels and ruins of ancient Tsurlagol.

  The water poured faster out of the fountain, washing against the tops of Ivy’s boots, and the bard’s tone-deaf daughter continued to shout-sing her way through the many verses of the Procampur song, describing the lovers preferred under each roof. Ivy had sung all the way to the third verse when the floor of the chamber began to shake.

  Parts of the wall that she was facing began to dissolve into dust as a raggedy-eared, nasty-looking, blind head came pushing through the newly formed hole, a head that was nothing more than an enormous open circle of mouth. There were no teeth, no eyes, and mere breathing slits where the nose should be, with no sort of bone structure to its face that could be bashed with a well-aimed blow. The only large feature on the head, besides the wide-open maw, were the ears. They were shaped a bit like winter-dead tree leaves, folding into three sections with deep indentations and sharp points all around their edges. Each ear twitched wildly in opposite directions.

  A second head shoved into the hole above the first one, and a third popped up through a newly formed crack in the floor.

  The first beast clawed at its own ears as Ivy continued to bellow. The echoes in the chamber made it sound like more than a dozen singers were caterwauling in different corners of the room, all completely out of tune, and a beat or two behind each other. The creatures butted and banged against each other as they squeezed into the room.

  The destrachans had found her, and they seemed killing mad about her singing, as Mumchance had predicted.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As the destrachans came shrieking into the room, the river continued to rise. Each creature was anyone’s worst nightmare, almost as large as the hen house at the farm. Worse still were the weird reverberating screams being given by the monsters—howls so ugly that each cry echoed in Ivy’s head, making her back teeth ache.

  The lead monster moved in a crouch, its back legs bent, and its front legs reaching out. Muscles rippled from its jaw to its humped back and down past the powerful haunches to its heavy pointed tail. Its thick hide looked waterproof, and Ivy wondered again if destrachans could swim. Or float. That would mess up her plans rather badly. The creature’s talons curved out from its feet like blades. That it was blind in no way lessened its powers, and there was no way at all of knowing how sensitive it was to movement. Certainly it was aware of her singing, turning its blind head from side to side as it tried to pinpoint where she was standing. Luckily, its fellows kept bumping into it, and it would break off from its hunting to swipe a talon or tail at the other two.

  Obviously, Ivy thought, there was some disagreement going on about who would get to eat her first.

  Above her, Gunderal’s chanting was adding to the confusion. Her light, high song of the river overlaid Ivy’s deeper rough voice booming out her ribald love song. With all that sound swirling through the room and the destrachans’ own cries adding to the confusion, the monsters tucked down their flapped ears, flat against their heads, rather like a man might squeeze his eyelids closed against a too-bright light. The beasts fanned out, wildly swinging their talons in the space around Ivy and screeching in a way that made her eardrums ache. Bits of stone shattered as the destrachans’ oscillating cries nearly deafened Ivy and the watchers on the stairs above.

  At least Archlis had been truthful about the creatures’ senses. It seemed that they were primarily limited to using their hearing to locate her. If the breathing slits gave them an ability to smell, Gunderal’s spell should hide her from that betrayal of her location. Now, if only the river would rise faster. The water was barely up to the small of the creatures’ backs.

  “Come on,” Ivy sang, weaving her worries into the lyrics of her song, “if you find me too quickly, that won’t be any fun for you. And ladies of Procampur know blue-roof sailor boys want to roll, roll, roll with the tide!”

  The tower was small with three destrachans crashing around its base. Ivy hopped up a few stairs to avoid the heavy bodies blundering in the center. When the destrachans collided with each other, little shrieks would come out of their mouths. The biggest one shrieked loudest, and the other two would back off for a bit, and then start hunting for her again. One of the beasts stumbled into the fountain and got its big foot stuck in the basin. It pointed its mouth toward the marble and let out a moaning cry. As the stone turned to dust, a wider hole formed where the fountain had been, and the river rushed faster into the room.

  “Ready?” Zuzzara called down to her.

  “Let the water rise a bit,” Ivy called, staggering as a wave caused by a destrachan’s thrashing tail rushed past her. Gasping, Ivy spit water out of her mouth, blinked, and tried to push her wet hair out of her eyes. It stuck to the dust and mud that already caked her face. “I don’t want them to turn back and escape.”

  One of the ears twitched on the nearest destrachans, and it swung its head up, pointing toward Zuzzara. Ivy immediately broke into a new song, an old favorite of her mother. “In this world is naught but trouble and sorrow, but why walk in shadow, why run in the night, when you can fly, fly, fly away!”

  “Ivy, what do you want me to do?” Zuzzara called.

  “Time to fly, time to fly away, time to soar,” she bellowed in reply, keeping to the rhythm of the song. Gods knew her singing was awful, but it did seem to keep the destrachans from hunting the others. Ivy grasped the winged serpent belt buckle beneath her fingers. “Pull the wings open three times and then shut,” Kid had said, and she did. Nothing happened. “There’s nothing but trouble, trouble and sorrow,” she sang as she grappled with the belt, “when magic belts won’t save you.”

  “Hey,” yelled Zuzzara from above. “That doesn’t sound right. I think you have the words wrong.”

  The beasts circled Ivy, bouncing their cries off the crumbling walls of the chamber, tilting their ears to catch the echoes. Now they were circling together around the base of the tower, each step bringing them closer to where Ivy stood on the first step of the stone staircase. A taloned foot shot out, flashing in front of Ivy’s eyes. Its claw was so close to her that she felt the movement of air against her face. She clamped her mouth shut, hoping the sudden silence would confuse the creatures.

  The three mud-colored destrachans prowled, then stopped and raised their wide mouths toward the ceiling of the chamber. Even their ears became motionless. Were they sensing her movements? Could they feel her breathe?

  Suddenly all the ears twitched at the same time, and the creatures tilted their heads toward Gunderal, high above them—a frail figure, but calm and concentrated. The creatures let out a hideous howl. Gunderal gracefully placed her fingers in her ears and continued to chant.

  “Run with me, sad screamers, walk in shadow, run in sorrow,” Ivy sang, and her voice echoed from all the walls. Ivy opened her mouth to sing another verse, and her mind went blank. The words of all the hundreds of songs that she knew tangled in her head and bottled up in her throat. But it was enough. The destrachans had turned toward her again and away from her friends. And the river was over the first step of the stair and rising rapidly. She backed up the spiral a little higher.

  “Pull the wings open three times and then shut,” she howled at the beasts sloshing toward her, their talons extended like cats looking to play with mice. Her
fingers plucked again at the silver buckle. “One, two, three, shut! Surprise! The magic is busted!”

  Even where she stood on the staircase, the water was up to her waist and sloshing now around the shoulders of the destrachans. She thought about yelling at Zuzzara to haul her up, but being dragged on a rope against the rough stones would hurt. Instead she began to move more quickly up the stairs, her boots echoing on the stone steps.

  One of the destrachans stretched out its neck and directed a wave of sound from its tubular mouth. Behind her, the lower stairs began to crumble. Ivy looked back and saw the smooth slabs of stone treads crash into the water, leaving jagged mounds. Waves shot up beside her, sloshing on the outer side of the stairs and breaking over her legs.

  “Run!” Mumchance shouted from above.

  “Blast,” Ivy cried, leaping up the stairs, just ahead of the cracking rock. It was a long staircase, circling the full chamber. Behind her, the biggest beast howled and wallowed in the water, tumbled over, and righted itself. Its neck stretched out. Again it let out a burst of sound.

  “Keep running! Don’t look!” Zuzzara screamed.

  She didn’t have to look. She felt the stair tread fall away under her back foot. She dragged on her gauntlets as she ran, throwing her weight forward. She sprawled on the upper steps, both feet on a solid stair. Her gloved hands scraped over the stone stair treads, caught, and held. She had collected a whole new set of bruises across her ribs and stomach, but she was safe.

  “Shall I pull now?” Zuzzara shouted.

  Ivy knew how that would go, her body bump-bump-bumping up stone stairs. Which would be worse: face down with her nose scraped raw against the stone, or on her back with every bang on her armor adding more bruises to her much abused body? “No! Not yet!”

  Scrambling to her feet, Ivy continued up the stairs, her feet pounding. The sound and vibrations attracted the beasts, but she knew of no way to run up stone stairs silently. Ivy glanced down at the red belt encircling her waist. Magic! It was never trustworthy—not for her. Balancing herself with one hand against the wall, she caught the wings of the little silver serpent buckle in her left hand.