Sand of the Soul

by Voronica Whitney-Robinson

  “Ivy is right,” said the dwarf to Ivy’s surprise. He usually argued with her on the general principle that any right-minded 330-year-old dwarf knew more than a 25-year-old human. “And you should all be carrying tinderboxes and extra candles for underground work. It is not like Gunderal could light a candle if we need it.”

  “No, but I can use your flint and stone, you always have one with you,” Gunderal said to the dwarf, unruffled by his comment. Her genasi heritage made all water spells fantastically easy for her—but it also caused fire spells to fail in a puff of damp smoke whenever she tried even the simplest flame tricks. “And there are other ways to light the dark, that don’t need fire.”

  “Magic,” grumbled the dwarf, as he led them towards the entrance. “It’s not wise to rely too much on magic. I keep telling you girls that, but you never listen to me.”

  “Yes, Mumchance,” said Zuzzara and Gunderal together. “We know.”

  At the tunnel’s entrance, Mumchance cocked his head and listened, then he whistled. A faint shout came back from Kid and a shrill yap from Wiggles.

  “Probably safe,” Mumchance decided. He jerked a thumb towards the officer from Procampur. “Is he coming?”

  Ivy turned to Sanval. “Are you coming?”

  “Perhaps I should stay here,” said Sanval, looking at the dark entrance to the tunnel. Ivy was sure that he was calculating how long it would take his servant to clean his armor after squeezing through the dirty hole. “And guard the entrance.”

  “There’s no danger,” said Ivy, squeezing around Mumchance so she could go first. “None of Fottergrim’s patrols have left the walls for days. And besides, Gunderal has a potion to hide us.”

  Once everyone had entered the tunnel, Gunderal extracted a crystal flask from her heavily embroidered belt pouch. She pulled the glass stopper out and carefully let three drops fall on the ground. A pale smoke rose, darkening as it filled the entrance. “From the outside, it just looks like a shadow cast by one of the trees,” Gunderal explained. “You have to step in it before you can see this hole.”

  Ivy shifted her sword from her side to her back and tightening the straps to keep it close to her body. Last thing that she needed was to go tripping over her own blade when trying to show the tunnel to Sanval. She wanted to impress him with her explanations of the intricacies to undermining walls (and why those intricacies needed more than two days), not stumble about looking like an idiot. A few awkward paces in, she was able to stand upright.

  As they advanced further into the tunnel, Ivy explained to Sanval how they had used their own timbers to stabilize the roof.

  “So it is safe now?” Sanval asked, as dirt continued to dribble down the walls, little clods landing behind them with soft puffs of sound.

  “For a rabbit,” muttered Mumchance. “Anything heavier …”

  “Is just fine,” finished Ivy. “See, here’s Kid and Wiggles.”

  Kid greeted her with a fleeting smile and a ducked head. Small and compact, with features almost as pretty as Gunderal, most people thought Kid was “sweet” until he dipped his long fingers into their pockets.

  “Well?” said Ivy as soon as she reached him.

  Kid stamped one hoof against the dirt and then moved two paces over and stamped again. Both stamps sounded the same to Ivy and she said so.

  “Little different, my dear,” explained Kid. “Like Mumchance, I hear something wrong here.” His pointed catlike ears were good. He often heard things that the others missed, and that was saying a lot in a group that included a half-orc, a half-genasi, and a full-blooded dwarf.

  “Told you,” said Mumchance, coming up to them. The others all clustered closely around to hear the discussion.

  “All right,” said Ivy. “The ground is a little soft.” She stamped too. Her foot sank down into the dirt and a little more dry earth trickled off a tree root above her head and dropped on her nose. Ivy sneezed.

  “Ivy, can you move a little further down the tunnel?” asked Gunderal, with a wrinkle of her delicate nose. “All I can smell is your boots.”

  Ivy obediently shifted behind Zuzzara, further away from Gunderal.

  “Phew!” said Zuzzara, waving a hand in front of her half-orc nose.

  “It’s not that bad,” said Ivy, scraping her boots against a tree root. She had done the same thing earlier when she was leaving the camp, using a handy rock to rub off the worst muck. She guessed she must have missed a spot or two.

  “Hush!” said Mumchance, a worried look wrinkling his scarred face. The dwarf relied more on his ears underground than any other sense. He claimed that he could usually hear danger before he saw it. Wiggles whined at his feet, and the dwarf picked up the little dog and popped her into his pocket. It was an old habit, but it startled most people to see the dog’s sharp white nose and large pink ears suddenly emerge from the pocket of a stout, gray-bearded dwarf.

  “Phhstt,” said Ivy, brushing the dirt off her face and trying to stifle a second sneeze. It came out as a loud snort.

  Mumchance dropped to one knee to get his head closer to the ground and even patted the earth with one gnarled hand. “There’s something here.”

  “Yes, I smell something below us,” said Gunderal.

  “What?” said Ivy.

  “Water,” said Gunderal. Another gift from her genasi ancestors, Gunderal’s sensitivity to water’s proximity was as strong or stronger than her ability to detect magic.

  “Water, running fast, and the earth moving with it, unable to hold it, breaking away as old rocks shift,” Kid’s voice echoed eerily in the tunnel. Like Gunderal, Kid often sensed things that the others couldn’t see or hear or smell, especially changes created by magic. No one knew what ancestor gave Kid that ability—probably the same one who had left him the little ivory horns hidden under his dark curls and the fine pair of hooves on the other end.

  Ivy shuffled her feet. Mumchance was right, the ground did feel soft under her feet, almost like stepping on something rotten. She looked back towards the entrance. They could go out, maybe probe for another way into this tunnel. This spot was too soft, look at Sanval, the weight of his armor was literally causing him to sink into the dirt, it was almost to the level of his ankles. The same thing was happening to Zuzzara, who was trying to sidestep cracks growing in the tunnel’s floor. Ivy suddenly realized what she was seeing. “Oh no!” she yelled. “Get back, get back.”

  She tried to pull Mumchance back from a suddenly appearing crack, and pulled too hard, so he stumbled into Gunderal, who grabbed at Zuzzara, who swung around and got her shovel entangled in Sanval’s sword, who fell heavily forward, almost crushing Kid beneath him. They all swayed together and then began to fall. They kept falling as the tunnel floor collapsed beneath them.

  Ivy grabbed for all of them, trying to save everyone and failing to get a grip on anyone.

  The ground crumbled below her feet. She plunged into darkness, into the swift sound of cold water below. She fell fast and hit the water hard, the icy current shocking her silent as the river pulled her under.

  Ivy surfaced, coughing and spitting out water that tasted of mud and ice. The strong current surged around her hips. The water was cold, pulled-out-of-the-mountain cold, pulled-out-of-the-heart-of-the-earth cold. It felt cold. It smelled cold. It even sounded cold, the river’s hissing whisper running swiftly around her.

  She could barely keep her balance. The sodden leather breeches and damp padded tunic that she wore under her mismatched pieces of armor added to her misery. The weight of her sword on her back was her only comfort. The criss-cross of leather straps keeping the scabbard high on her back still held the blade safe. She checked the side of her belt; her dagger was still secure in its sheath. She thought about loosening the ties on her belt dagger so she could use the knife quickly. But in the water, with her footing so unstable, she decided that she might drop any weapon that she drew.

  Her braid lay sodden across the back of her neck. With bare hands she reached u
p and confirmed that she had lost her leather cap. She swore a little. She liked that cap. Being secondhand, it was nicely softened for the most comfortable fit possible. Now it was gone and Ivy would have to find another one. Maybe she would get lucky and fall over another dead body wearing a cap.

  Her gauntlets, armored and lined with sheepskin, luckily survived the fall and were still stuck in her weapons belt. She pulled them on to protect her hands from the cold water. Besides, the scaled armor on the knuckles of her gloves made a formidable weapon if something jumped her before she could draw her blade.

  Ivy stood in the darkness, with water hissing past her, and blinked. She blinked again. It was still pitch black and she could see nothing. She patted her pouch. She had her tinder and flint but no candles. The icy current hissed past her hips and, further down, she heard a faint splashing sound. She tried a hesitant step forward. It felt like she was moving downhill. Ivy lost her footing, slipped, and slid under the water again.

  When she surfaced, cursing steadily, the water sluiced off her. The sound of her splashing progress through the water made it impossible to judge the direction. The river was not deep, just bitterly cold as if it ran straight underground from some mountaintop glacier. Freezing to death seemed more likely than drowning. The snow-cold water soaked through the gaps in her armor, soaking her padded tunic, and the thin shirt she wore under that, adding additional weight to topple her over. Ivy started moving, deciding it made no sense to stay still and shudder herself into pieces. If she ran into any sort of enemy—a hobgoblin or an orc seemed likely with a city full of them overhead—she wasn’t sure how well she could swing her sword while shivering.

  With no light, she relied on her less-than-perfect human hearing to get her bearings. The sound of the river distorted her sense of direction. 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 halfway 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 down. Feeling under the water, she found the grate plunged down to the river bottom, leaving only a hands width of space between it and the stony bottom.

  Resurfacing, she felt along the grate, all the time whistling as loud as she could past chattering teeth, 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 towards the right along the cold metal grid that blocked the river.

  Out of the corner of her left eye, she saw a faint glimmer of light. The light jerked and weaved towards her. Flattening her back against the grate, Ivy drew her sword from her dripping scabbard. She waited where she was, to see if it was friend or foe that advanced upon her.

  A high yip-yap-yap sounded from the source of the light. Ivy sighed and one-handed, 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 chainmail and leather, also sodden with water, had left him momentarily 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 towards the left bank, guided by Mumchance’s lantern. “Where were you? Is everyone safe?”

  “We’re directly behind you. You kept swimming down river, 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 this attempt to scold her. “Daft human!” It was his worst epitaph 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, 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 squelched 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.

  December 2007

  from Wizards of the Coast

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