“Love that spell,” Ivy said to Zuzzara.
“Good,” said Zuzzara, “you can pay to recharge the ring next time. You know how much fire and air spells mixed together cost?”
“What was that?” asked Sanval, holding up one arm to examine with bemusement the regained brilliance of his armor.
“Couple of spells, combined, and caught in the gem,” explained Gunderal. “One spell dispels the water and dries you off. Another warms you up. And your clothes are cleaned in the process.” She gazed with satisfaction at her silk skirts, once again swirling like flower petals around her dainty ankles.
“You only stay warm for a bit,” said Zuzzara, “but you stay dry until you fall into another river or snow bank. Gunderal thought it up for a winter campaign.”
“It was the most horrible, miserable time of my life,” murmured the wizard with an exaggerated shudder. “I was not just wet and cold all the time. My clothes were muddy and stayed dirty. There was no place to take a hot bath or clean your things.”
“That wasn’t so bad.” Ivy shrugged. “But having your feet wet and cold all day and all night is never fun.”
“So I thought of a way that we could combine a few spells to clean us all up,” said Gunderal with a shake of her head at Ivy’s usual dismissal of the importance of baths. “But since I can’t cast fire spells, we have to hire someone else to cast them and store them in the ring. Of course, I can’t wear the ring either. Something about the fire spell turns my finger bright red!”
“So I wear the ring,” explained Zuzzara.
“ ‘Dry Boots’ is what we ended up calling that combination of spells. Although the wizard who charged the ring used fancier words,” recalled Ivy.
“Dry Boots is what it is. Dry boots is what it does,” said Zuzzara. “Wizards can be too fancy at times.”
“Not me,” whispered Gunderal. She was still pale from the pain of having her arm strapped, but she used the fingers of her good hand to twist her curls back into their perfect, blue-black ringlets. Her potions were smashed, but her enameled hairpins and shell combs had survived the fall. She made two more twists of her hair, achieving a fetching topknot. “I just like to be warm, and clean, and well dressed.”
“An excellent preference,” Sanval agreed with a nod of approval at Gunderal. Ivy sighed and shook her head at the pair’s mad obsession with cleanliness.
“Zuzzara was talking about magic,” said Mumchance with a roll of his good eye at Gunderal’s grooming. “And even you, lovely Gunderal, can get carried away. You can’t just make it rain. When you call the rain, it has to rain with black clouds and lightning strikes, and a cold wind rising up from the earth. Has to rain until it floods, and we’re all floating away on the barn roof.”
“Just that one time,” said Zuzzara, stepping in front of Gunderal. She might fuss at Gunderal all day and night, but she always defended her when others did the same thing. “Don’t be so hard on her.”
Ivy let them chatter when they should have been moving because she knew the wizard needed time to regain some strength. But the delay still worried her. The water was definitely lapping over the edge of the riverbank.
“All I’m saying …” said Mumchance.
“Is that we had a magnificent rainmaking business until we had too much rain. You humans and demi-humans never learn to control your magic—not like dwarves,” said Ivy and Zuzzara and Kid all together. Gunderal giggled, a faint flush of color coming back to her cheeks. Mumchance rolled his eyes.
“It’s an old argument,” said Ivy, “and it never quite goes away.” Zuzzara snorted.
“Well, Gunderal, my lovely wizard,” said Mumchance, “you’ve done even better this time. The river is rising, Ivy.”
“I know, I know,” said Ivy, “and it’s my fault, not Gunderal’s, that we’re sitting so low underground. If Gunderal feels well enough to move now, we need to find a way out. Mumchance? Kid?”
The dwarf nodded at Kid, who nodded back. The dwarf’s sense of direction underground was superb, but Kid came a close second. Sanval started to say something, but Ivy laid a finger against her lips. Silence was needed now.
The dwarf closed his eye and cocked his head. He stomped his feet a bit, his boot heels ringing on the ground; and Kid stomped back, making the high sharp clicks of hooves against stone. Kid’s ears swiveled under his glossy curls, forward, back, and then flat to his head. Mumchance nodded left and then nodded right, and clucked his tongue. Kid whistled. The two opened their eyes at the same time and turned in the same direction.
“That way,” said Mumchance pointing off to the right. “There’s a tunnel entrance down there.”
“Maybe two, my dear,” said Kid, sniffing the air. “Big hole and little hole, running close together.”
Ivy nodded. Underground, Mumchance had the best sense of direction, but Kid often surprised them with his unerring instinct for the safest route or the quickest way to the surface.
Zuzzara bent down to pick up Gunderal. “I can walk,” whispered the wizard. “It’s not my legs that are broken.”
“What if you faint again?”
“Don’t argue,” said Ivy, “or argue later. We need to move.” Even with her human eyes, she could see the water was higher now, almost to the lip of the ledge where they rested. “No more Dry Boots, remember?”
Gunderal made a face and stood up, following the others away from the river water. Although she was descended from the water genasi on her mother’s side and could, with a simple spell, breathe perfectly well underwater, she was not dressed for swimming and was rather relieved that nobody had asked her to try to find a way out through the river. Normally, when Gunderal went swimming, she had a special, magical scaled outfit to wear—one that looked stunning both wet and dry.
The Siegebreakers felt along the ledge, walking cautiously in the direction that the dwarf had indicated.
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 have 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, sh
e 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.
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