"If he is so clever, why can't he break the trap's spell?" Gunderal whispered.
"It is not a spell," Kid whispered back. "Do you feel any magic here?"
Gunderal's pretty face smoothed into that look of perfect serenity that meant she was feeling along the Weave of magical forces. She slowly shook her head.
Mumchance nodded in agreement with Kid. "It's all mechanical."
Ivy backed away from Archlis, fingering the hilt of her sword. Sanval also had a firm grip on his weapon. Archlis did not look worried, which was worrisome. The bugbears were a bit too relaxed as well, just leaning on their glaives and watching with interest. They obviously felt no threat.
"Waste of time," said Mumchance, who had been studying the floor and then the ceiling while carrying on a whispered conversation with Kid. He squinted at the little thief, who nodded very firmly this time. "All that hopping back and forth. Kid, get ready. Come up here, Zuzzara."
"No," said Archlis, "it must be two of almost equal weight who start the pattern."
"Don't care about the pattern." Mumchance scratched
Wiggles's head as he contemplated the room. "Zuzzara, how far can you throw a dead hobgoblin?"
"Same as a live one," she said with grin. "Halfway across the room without much trouble."
"Should work. Let's get you a little help. Hey, you, big guy," Mumchance said, crooking a finger at the nearest bugbear. "Hook me a hobgoblin with that stick of yours. The little one near the door will work fine. He's almost intact."
The bugbear growled at Mumchance, but he went to the threshold of the room. The hairs on the back of the bugbear's neck were clearly visible just below the line of his battered helmet and just as clearly standing straight out. The bugbear muttered and grumbled, very softly in the back of his throat, as he looked beyond the room to the doors on the far side. Still, he obeyed Mumchance's orders, ignoring the scowling magelord. The bugbear leaned through the doors, carefully keeping his feet out of the room and off the carved pavement. He thrust his glaive into the nearest hobgoblin and dragged it back through the door.
"You get one end. Zuzzara, you grab the other," instructed Mumchance. "Kid, get ready to jump."
Kid crouched in the center of the door. Zuzzara and the bugbear swung the body twice and then sent it sailing over Kid's head and into the room. It fell heavily on the tiles. With a screeching of gears above the ceiling, then the clash of unwinding chains, the ironwork grid dropped from above them and crashed to the floor, again impaling the dead hobgoblins and orcs.
"Go! Go!" shouted Mumchance at Kid.
Kid leaped lightly on top of the ironwork and raced across the grid. A ponderous tick-tick of gears sounded in the ceiling. "It's starting up again," yelled Mumchance. Kid spurted ahead and dropped in front of the doors. He grasped the lever and twisted it savagely around to the right. There was a grinding noise that came from the ceiling and then a distinct sproing sounded through the room. The spiked grid remained where it had landed on the floor.
"See," said Mumchance, hoisting himself on top of the ironwork and strolling straight across. "Much easier to break it than to go dancing across the floor."
If the magelord was pleased, it did not show in his scowl. The bugbears looked on, expressionless, but then Ivy did not expect any sort of expression on a bugbear's squashed furry face.
When they reached the far side of the room, Ivy said to the dwarf, "That was just too easy. What terrible thing happens next, do you suppose?"
"Look, these old tomb builders weren't exactly mechanical geniuses," said Mumchance. "Well, one or two were good at it, and the others just copied them. I would bet you a good night's sleep that the gears are rusted out, the chains have weak links, and a couple more drops would have broken the whole thing. But the most delicate gears are always in the lock mechanism. The magelord was right. It's all about balance and counterbalance, the right pressure at the right time. Archlis had already forced it open twice today, so it was sure to be a bit bunged up."
"And if the ironwork went back into place while Kid was racing across?"
"Wouldn't move that fast. Archlis said there was enough time for a bunch of Fottergrim's raiders to follow him through and out once already, which meant some type of gear rotating in the lock and, most likely, the same sort of gear powering the resetting of the trap. Of course, if there had been any magic behind it, that would have been different, but Gunderal didn't smell anything. But, Ivy, that's all done and in the past. You should be worrying about something else."
"What?"
"Whatever chased them back into this room. You heard the magelord. They went through once, doing that hop-jump-hop across the floor. Fottergrim's hounds followed them and then something forced Archlis back across that room one more time. It wasn't those hobgoblins and orcs. He roasted them as soon as they caught up to him."
The dwarf had a point. Ivy just hated that. A magelord unhindered by hobgoblins and unflustered by stray warriors appearing in the middle of his battles (even if those warriors were a battered troupe like Ivy's) would only retreat from something very large and fairly fireproof. And deadly. She doubted that anything short of deadly would stop him. What came next must be far more dangerous than Fottergrim's fighters.
"I knew this was too easy," said a rueful Ivy. Staying next to Mumchance, she squeezed to one side to let Zuzzara, Gunderal, and Sanval pass into the corridor beyond. Archlis and his bugbears followed. "Well, at least we got through that trap with minimum fuss."
Kid sidled next to her, stamping from hoof to hoof.
"Those early tomb builders lacked sophistication." Mumchance poked at the broken mechanism that locked the trap into place, wiggling the long brass handle that disappeared into a square hole carved into the stone. Like any dwarf, he never could resist trying to pull something apart just to see how it worked. Ivy almost expected him to pry the mechanism out of the wall, just so he could examine it later. "Not like today. If I had built that bit back there, there would be some secondary trap or…"
Ivy never heard the rest of the sentence. The stone slab under her feet slid open with a sharp click and the rattle of chains running through a stone channel. She and Kid dropped into the darkness below. As she was falling, she caught a brief glimpse of Mumchance's surprised face, his mouth still open, before the stone trapdoor snapped shut above her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The day after a fifteen-year-old Ivy had been dug out from under a dead horse by a kindly dwarf, she had wanted to stop at the nearest temple and make a few offerings.
Mumchance had dissuaded her.
"I wouldn't," he had said. "Over the last three hundred years, the one thing that I have learned is that it is best to ignore the gods. Take no notice of them, and they will take no notice of you."
It had seemed like good advice at the time. Now Ivy wondered if she had angered some god somewhere. Nothing else could account for her foul luck.
She sat up slowly in the darkness beneath the trapdoor, unsure which parts of her body still worked after her fall. Her ribs ached, her back hurt, and the rubble covering the floor was making itself felt through the leather of her breeches. But none of the pains felt fatal, just more bruises on top of the bruises collected in her earlier falls that day, not to mention the buffeting by kobolds, the squeezing of that snake, and-oh now she remembered-a few well-placed blows from the hobgoblins. Once she was free of this tangle of tunnels and traps, Ivy intended to march herself to the largest, most impressive healer's tent that she could find, lie down, and not get up again until every single cut, bruise, and kink in her muscles had been soothed away by some skilled healing hands. Some heroes might go to their temples to give thanks for salvation. Others might drink themselves blind in a victory party, and still others might pursue a new amorous alliance. From nauseous experience, Ivy had learned to avoid long drinking bouts, as they led to more physical misery. She did have a few ideas for possible lusty activities, and she most certainly planned to rethink her oppo
sition to giving thanks in temples (although she supposed she would have to decide what god or goddess would be willing to overlook her long lapse in abstinence from worship). But at this moment, she needed to give herself some special promise to lure herself into standing up.
"I think I'll find the handsomest cleric, with the most delightfully smooth and strong healing hands," she muttered to herself. "And then add that bill to the long list of payments that I intend to collect from the Thultyrl."
A muffled snort of laughter reminded her that she was not alone in the dark. She heard the scratch of Kid's hooves as he climbed across the rubble toward her.
"Kid," Ivy called. "Are you all right? Where are you?"
"Here, my dear," his soft voice was right under her ear, causing her to startle like a young colt. Then she felt the exceptional warmth of his hard little hand as he patted her cheek in reassurance. "I apologize that I am not a handsome cleric."
His hearing was far too sharp at times. Ivy ignored his comment and asked, "Where are we, do you think?"
She could hear the rustling of clothing near her that meant he was searching through one of his many hidden pockets. "How can you manage to fit so many pockets into that tunic?" Ivy grumbled, impatient for him to find his candles.
"I once apprenticed to a tailor, before he objected to my stealing his needles. I do have the candles," Kid said, then added, "but my flint is missing."
"Some day, one of us is going to have to learn fire spells." Ivy sighed and handed over her own tinderbox before standing up. She could hear Kid's nails scratching against the lid.
Stretching her arms above her head, Ivy could feel the cool, smooth stone of the ceiling. She groped along the ceiling, trying to find some crack or seam that would indicate the location of the trapdoor. Her left hand bumped against something that moved-a handle or rope pull she hoped. She traced a long knobby object under her groping fingers, something that felt like an old tree branch or dried-out root. It kept shifting in her grasp and was attached in a smooth curve to another part, covered with stiff material that crackled like old linen. Ivy continued to walk her hands along the floating object until she felt an unmistakable triangular bump. She grasped it firmly between her left forefinger and thumb. It wiggled slightly with a ripping sound.
As she stood up, a familiar odor hit her-the type of moldering stench one found too often underground. Ivy screwed up her face and tried to keep her breathing shallow.
"Kid," said Ivy very calmly and slowly. "Could you hurry with that light?"
"Coming, my dear." There was a spark, and the sudden illumination of the candle made Ivy blink.
Ivy kept her left arm stretched up and her grasp firm on her captured prize as she stared into Kid's startled eyes. She was going to have to turn and look, but for now all the confirmation she needed was in the dumbfounded look on Kid's face. "So," she said pleasantly to him. "Am I holding a floating corpse by its nose?"
Kid nodded. His brown eyes were wide and round under his curls, giving him the look of a startled deer. It took a lot to disconcert Kid, who would cheerfully loot through the newly dead and the decomposing dead alike.
"Rotting, is it?"
"I think it is past that, my dear. Some time ago."
"How do you think he got up there? And what is keeping him there?"
"I am not sure, my dear. Magic most certainly, and very old magic at that, as old as that flameskull that attacked us."
"Maybe it is one of that creature's friends."
"He did say that they were all dead," Kid mused.
Ivy tightened her grip and felt her gloved fingers slide through the rotted flesh of the nose into the open curve of the skull. She paused, tightened her jaw, and kept her gaze on Kid. She was in no hurry to look upward. Kid shrugged, then reached up also and caught hold of the decayed robe that hung loosely around the corpse. Together they pulled downward, Kid holding cloth, Ivy clutching bone.
The corpse resisted their efforts to drag it down to the ground. Every time they grabbed it and tugged, it drifted down, seemingly weightless, but then bobbed up again as soon as they let go. Ivy finally looked at the figure to better determine how to handle it. The man, whose flesh was so sunken and dried upon the skeletal frame that gender was not easy to determine, was dressed in some type of hooded linen robes. Thankfully, the hood had flopped forward and hidden the ruined features of his face. Ivy felt particularly bad about breaking off his long nose in her early attempts to pull him off the ceiling.
"Well, it is not his body that flies," Ivy decided. "The bits that fell off don't go floating away on their own."
Kid was standing directly under the body, his head tilted all the way back as he contemplated the corpse floating just out of his reach. "No amulets, no rings on his fingers," said Kid, reciting an inventory that made some type of sense to him. "The robe is rotting, so it cannot be that. It must be the belt, my dear."
A long thin belt of scarlet leather encircled the man's waist. The belt buckle was a large elaborate affair of chased silver, styled as a winged serpent eating its own tail. The serpent's wings fit over and under the circle, locking the belt into place. "The belt," repeated Kid firmly.
"Shall I cut it off him?" Ivy slid her sword out of its scabbard.
"No, no, my dear." Kid grasped her arm and pulled the blade back. "You might damage the magic if you cut it. Unlock the buckle, instead. The wings should move."
Ivy had to stand on tiptoe to get a firm grip on the belt buckle. She waggled the wings left and then right.
"Gently, gently, my dear." Kid was hopping from one hoof to the other, sending little pebbles rolling down the rubble pile with his fidgeting.
"I'm trying," Ivy grunted. The smell of dust, moid, and rot filled her nose, much more noticeable now that they had been hauling on the corpse. With her nose that much closer to the body, Ivy could easily smell the must of a corpse long, long past its prime. The belt buckle was uncommonly stiff and seemed permanently locked in position. She stretched up her left hand, candlelight winking on the harper's token on her glove, and twisted the whole serpent while she hung onto its wings with her right hand. With a snap, the two wings folded back. The belt and the corpse came crashing down on top of her, knocking her back on the pile of rubble.
Kid dragged the body off her and helped her to sit up. Ivy gasped a few times until her breath came back. She was not afraid of dead things, not in her line of work, but still. There was something extremely unpleasant about being felled by a rotting corpse.
"He was heavier than he looked," she finally gasped, hunching forward to ease the pressure on her thrice-bruised belly.
The belt hung limply in her grasp. Ivy shook it. The belt still hung straight down. "So, you figured how to get it down. Do you know how to make it go up again?"
"I think so, my dear." Kid ran his clever little fingers round and round the buckle. "This was wrought in imitation of the belts that the ancient ones used to fly to their floating cities. This man must have been one like Toram, who sought to imitate the great wizards of Netheril. Or perhaps he hoped to fly to one of the lost cities and plunder it. But such ambitions are treacherous."
"And you know this because…"
"I was Toram's godsight goat." Kid repeated Archlis's earlier words with a bitter, harsh tone quite unlike his normal fluting voice. "When Toram owned me, he trained me to know such magic as this, artifacts that he found in old tombs and crypts. To sniff such objects out for him. I told you Toram was a great grave robber. And all his magic he stole from others, as Archlis stole his power from him. Toram once said that I had a demon's knack for stealing old magic."
"And here I thought that you would have made a better thief without the horns and hooves," Ivy said, but she reached out a hand and ruffled his curls gently as a mute apology.
"After I ran away, my looks did betray me often, my dear," said Kid with a peculiar sound, halfway between a sigh and a laugh. "People drove me out of their towns with curses. I had no home u
ntil I met you."
Ivy remembered how she had almost broken Kid's hand the first time that they met (the hand had been cutting away her purse, and she had grabbed it and jerked without thinking). As an apology for her actions, she had chucked Kid over her shoulder and carried him back home for a hot meal. Kid had seemed a little surprised by her actions. But, as she told Mumchance later, it was the bad example that the dwarf set-dragging home all those stray dogs-that had made her drag home the cloven-hoofed thief.
"Well," Mumchance had said at the time, looking Kid over from his horns to his hooves. "You know the rules, Ivy. You made them. If you bring it home, you're responsible for it." But the dwarf, for all his casual airs, grew as bad as the rest of them, sneaking food onto Kid's plate when he wasn't looking and muttering about how he was too thin.
Ivy had always meant to ask Kid about his past. Perhaps sitting on a pile of rubble with a corpse was not the best time. But the sheer obsessive curiosity that she had inherited from both of her parents loosened her lips. "So how did you end up being owned by this Toram?"
Kid kept his eyes on the belt, waggling the wings left and right on the buckle, and then running the leather through his hands. He no longer wore his normal, pleasant expression-a slight smile and mildly sinister tilt of the eyebrow. Instead, his face was blank as though he were working harder than usual to hide his emotions from Ivy.
"When I was so small that I have no earlier memories, the Red Wizards kept me locked in a stone room. Toram came to their temple. He worked as a spy for them from time to time in return for glimpses of their scrolls and magic books. How he learned of me, I do not know, but one night he broke the lock and took me away bundled under his cloak."
"Red Wizards? You mean he stole you from Thay?" The legendary wrath and sheer terror evoked by even a whisper of Thay meant that the wizard Toram had to be exceptionally brave or, more likely, completely insane. Nobody stole from Thay if they wanted to keep their body intact and their soul out of eternal suffering. Even Ivy's mother, that reckless bard who regarded sea serpents as exceptionally annoying large fish, had warned her daughter specifically against encounters with anyone who even smelled like they might wear the scarlet robes. When she asked her father about Thay, he had simply rolled back his sleeves to show the horrible scars on his forearms left by one chance encounter with those terrible wizards.
Crypt of the Moaning Diamond d-4 Page 16
