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-orc 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-orc 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-orc 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-orc 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 ha
ve 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 orc. 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 its 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 dwarf's 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-orc'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-orc. 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 orc shout but still loud enough to make everyone else in the room wince. The skeleton picked up speed away from the half-orc, 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…"
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