Crypt of the Moaning Diamond

by Rosemary Jones

  He answered back in Common, “Don’t have to.”

  “Have to!” barked Ivy, relieved to be able to drop out of Orcish and into a language that didn’t make her throat hurt. Still, she didn’t know how much Common this creature knew. She kept it simple. “Archlis said!”

  “Did not!”

  “Ask him.” Ivy jerked a thumb at the magelord, his long nose already buried deep in his spellbook and muttering to himself. “But he won’t be happy if you disturb him.”

  The bugbear rumbled something at his companion, and the other bugbear grumbled back. “Females,” the creature said, very pointedly in Common so Ivy would understand, “are nothing but trouble.” He handed over a bag of supplies.

  “I would never disagree,” replied Ivy with a grin as she turned on her heel and headed back to her friends.

  On the top of the bag was fresh bread, still warm, as if it came from Tsurlagol’s bakeries only that morning. Under that was some dried meat. Everyone grabbed at the bread as soon as they smelled it. Ivy shrugged and snatched her share. It had been a very long time since breakfast; or, in Ivy’s case, since a few bites of dried biscuit.

  Mumchance offered some of the unidentified meat to Wiggles. The dog whined and turned up her nose at it. After seeing the dog’s reaction, the rest of them set the meat aside.

  While they ate, Archlis carefully turned the crumbling pages of his scorched spellbook. He bent so close to the book that the tip of his narrow nose looked in danger of smudging the ink. The expression on his face grew more sour, as if the spellbook did not yield exactly the answers that he desired. Yet he handled the decaying parchment with judicious care. The bugbears sat with their backs to Archlis and their attention on the group, but nobody did anything overtly hostile.

  Released by Zuzzara with a friendly pat to the back that staggered him, Sanval chose to sit down next to Ivy. She took it as a good sign that he had not minded her more colorful comments about his character when she had been dickering with Archlis. For the first time since he had come to her tent that morning, Sanval stripped off his gauntlets to accept some bread and fresh water from Ivy. She passed the food and drink over to him with a slightly apologetic smile. His own look lightened a little as he took the bread from her. When he took her peace offering, she noticed his big hands bore the usual scars across the knuckles and the backs of his fingers that came from sword practice. Even with wooden weapons, cuts were a common hazard; and no matter how good a cleric a house employed, not everything healed without a trace. Ivy’s own hands had a similar pale network of white scars across her skin.

  “Why was Archlis interested in that?” said Sanval, reaching out and touching the small silver oak leaf worked into the cuff of Ivy’s left glove. Her gloves were stuffed, as usual, through her belt.

  “Harper token. I told you my mother was a bard,” she said with an affectionate glance at her mother’s last gift. She still remembered the sting of the wind against her cheeks as she stood on the dock, watching her mother’s ship sail away. Over the wind and the sailors’ shouts, she had heard her mother’s cries of, “Farewell, farewell, I will return.” She remembered how warm the token had felt in her hand and how tightly her father’s hands had grasped her shoulders as they watched her mother wave good-bye.

  She tapped the little silver leaf. “This gets me free beer in an amazing number of places.”

  Sanval looked a little disappointed at her answer.

  “No, unfortunately, it is not much of spell. Just a tiny bit of extra luck, my mother said. It does keep me from losing whatever it is attached to, which is why I sewed it onto the glove. I hate losing my gloves. Of course, it only keeps one glove with me at all times. So I replace the other one quite frequently. I should have sewn it on my cap. I miss that cap.” She ran her hand across the top of her head, causing more short bits of blonde hair to escape her braid and trail across her face. She pushed them back with impatient, dusty fingers, ignoring Gunderal gesturing behind Sanval’s back with one of her own delicate shell combs. They were in the middle of an underground ruin, surrounded by bugbears, and essentially held prisoner by an unfriendly magelord. Ivy was not about to let Gunderal rebraid her hair now, even if it did give her fussy friend fits to see her braid come undone. Ivy let Gunderal braid her hair once a tenday, after she had washed her hair and bathed, and that was enough as far as Ivy was concerned. If she listened to the vain little wizard’s lectures on personal hygiene, she would be bathing every day and twice on holidays.

  With a sigh, Sanval pulled off his metal helmet and ran his own hand across his hair. Ivy checked with a sideways glance. All his curls looked very washed and polished. He probably did bathe once a day, and then let his servants clip and comb his hair into that regulation cut that all of Procampur’s officers favored for this particular war. Yet that one curl stood defiantly out of line with its fellows. Ivy smiled at the curl’s crooked gallantry, and Sanval gave her an inquiring look. She did not enlighten him.

  “I thought the charm on your glove was something that we could use against Archlis. He seemed disturbed by it,” Sanval said.

  Ivy shook her head. “It’s not much of charm. Won’t do anything spectacular. Besides, Archlis has a dozen or more charms sewn on that coat of his that are certainly more powerful than this. And look at his hands—a magic ring on each hand. Those are probably protections and spells too.”

  “But you must have more magic than that,” said Sanval, tapping the token again.

  “Zuzzara’s ring, but we used that already. Gunderal’s potions, which we lost in the fall.”

  “Armor? Weapons?”

  “Mumchance has full plate with some extra protection hammered in, but he doesn’t wear it in the summer. It is too hot, he says, and that’s why he just has the chain mail today. All of us have charms against injury from falls, but as you can tell from Gunderal’s arm, they are not too powerful.” She thought about mentioning Mumchance’s fake eye, but the secrets that Sanval did not know, he could not let slip to others. Archlis did not seem to be paying any attention to them, but wizards could have ears and eyes in the backs of their head, sometimes quite literally. Better to appear more harmless than they were, especially when they did not have that much magic to spare.

  “But weapons. Magic swords? Spears?”

  “Do you see any of those things on us? Zuzzara’s shovel is most firmly unenchanted. My sword is just that—a sword. Good balance, keen edge, no spells. Mumchance’s sword is the same. Better balance than mine, being forged by dwarves and all, but no spells of smiting. In fact, he usually forgets he is carrying it and uses one of his hammers instead. Gunderal never carries weapons, because she usually can cast spells or use her potions, when she hasn’t broken all the potion bottles. Kid, do you have anything magical?”

  “No, my dear. Two sharp little knives, but that is all.” Kid had pitched his voice loud enough to carry to where Archlis was sitting. Good, thought Ivy, he has figured it out—do not give Archlis any reason to be nervous. Kid had flipped open the collar of his leather tunic to display the two needle-thin blades neatly sheathed there. Sanval seemed disappointed. Of course, he did not know that the stilettos were deadly in Kid’s hands. The little thief could throw with frightening speed and accuracy when he wanted to. Kid’s knives also had the excellent advantage of being able to double as lock picks on the cruder sort of lock. And, of course, being Kid, he had not shown all his knives. He carried another tucked in the back of his breeches. Gods only knew how he kept from slicing his furry little tail off. Of course, he kept that tucked away out of sight most of the time too.

  “I thought you would have more magic,” said Sanval.

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because in the red-roof district …” Sanval stopped at Ivy’s whistle of surprise and went a little pink across his cheeks. One of the bugbears glanced over at them, shrugged, and went back to eating something that dripped unpleasantly.

  “So you do talk to the red-roo
f tavern girls. I wondered how you knew the end of that song.”

  “Everyone goes to a red-roof tavern,” Sanval admitted, “when they are young. To hear the stories. You know, about the dragons, and the adventurers, and the great deeds done in the rest of the world. But in all the stories, people like you … They always own many items of magic that they use to defeat their foes. Great and terrible weapons of power are carried by all the mercenaries. That is what they say in the camp.”

  “You should never believe camp gossip,” said Kid, reaching past Sanval to snag another piece of bread and stuff it into his cheek like a berrygobbler.

  “Sound advice. What they always leave out in the ballads and the camp gossip is that magic costs, and red-roof adventurers like me rarely can afford much.” Ivy looked at Sanval, a man who could afford to bring three horses to a siege camp, along with the necessary servants. He wore full half-plate armor, forged just for him, properly fitted and certainly kitted underneath with leather, silk, cotton padding, and whatever else was deemed necessary for his comfort. He probably even owned more than one shirt although she asked him just to make sure.

  “I brought twelve shirts with me,” he replied.

  “I have two, one clean and one not,” she said, but he did not look enlightened. She gave him a basic lesson in economics, the mercenary version of economics. “Magic costs. Gold. Coin. Gems. It takes wealth to buy the best spells and best enchanted items. We do all right, but we never make that much. And what we earn goes back to the farm. We made a promise to each other—that was what we would do.”

  “But he has magic,” said Sanval, nodding toward Archlis.

  “Because he is a wicked wizard!”

  “Magelord, my dear,” said Kid. “He stole that title from my master Toram, when he took Toram’s book and Ankh.”

  “Magelord, magician, whatever he prefers to call himself, I would wager he’s not trying to pay for a working farm, with vinestock that needs replacing, and a mule that deliberately goes lame when it doesn’t want to haul the wagon (and nobody will let me turn into shoe leather), and more dogs and cats than you can count—or feed—because somebody is always dragging home some poor stray. I will not even try to account for the many expenses of an ill wyvern that ended up destroying our barn roof.” Ivy subsided. There was no use trying to explain her problems to a man who could afford to bring twelve shirts to a siege camp and had probably never in his life had to sit up all night on a roof beam with a wyvern vomiting some type of acidic sludge.

  “I would prefer your farm to any wizard’s wonders,” said Sanval, and he sounded sincere in his statement. “But I still wish that you had more magic, like that magelord’s charms.”

  “Do not forget his Ankh,” whispered Kid. “That is a weapon paid for by murder.”

  “Ankh?”

  “That,” said Kid, pointing at the metal pole that Archlis leaned against. It was topped by a smooth loop of metal and a crossbar of the same.

  “I though it was a crutch,” said Ivy.

  Kid shook his head sadly. “No, it is the Ankh of Fire that he stole from my master.”

  “That is a rather large ankh,” said Ivy, eyeballing the length of the thing. “I thought ankhs were little things that priests wore on their belts.”

  “This Ankh was forged for a giant and casts the most terrible and powerful spells. It took Toram years to find the tomb where it was hidden.”

  “What type of spells?”

  “Fire spells.”

  “What sort of fire spell?” Her father had hated and feared fire as much as any tree in the forest.

  “Many and many, my dear,” said Kid, his ears drooping down and back, almost flat and hidden among his curls. “Enough to burn us all. He does not bluff when he claims such power.”

  “That settles it,” Ivy said to Sanval. “You have to stifle any objections to an alliance with Archlis. You did notice how quickly he disposed of those hobgoblins and orcs,” she continued when Sanval said nothing.

  “But he is the sworn enemy of Procampur,” protested Sanval.

  “We are his enemies,” agreed Ivy in soothing tones. What did it take to make one man in shiny armor to see reason? “And there are more of us, but does he look perturbed? That means he thinks he can beat us and, given the size and the number of fireballs that he was tossing off the walls of Tsurlagol over the last tenday, I think he can too.”

  “He won’t dare try a fireball in here,” said Gunderal, catching the end of their discussion. “These tunnels are too narrow. He would burn himself.”

  When the others looked skeptical, Gunderal said with a huff, “Just because I can’t do fire spells does not mean that I never studied them.”

  Zuzzara shook her head, setting her braids swinging and the iron beads on the ends clicking together. “What do you mean?”

  “Flames spread, just like water! Simple enough for you, big sister?”

  “Temper, temper,” replied the half-orc. “You should eat something. You are getting cranky, little sister.”

  Gunderal started to reply and then obviously thought better of it. She tore off a small bit of bread and chewed dainty but deliberate bites. Zuzzara smiled to see her sister follow her advice.

  “What about that sphere spell?” asked Mumchance. “That fire chased those hobgoblins and orcs precisely enough.”

  “For all those reasons, we are not going to get into a fight that we cannot win and will not gain us anything,” Ivy emphasized to Sanval. “Don’t play the hero.”

  “You always say that,” said Sanval in a sharper tone than he usually used.

  “Because I know what heroics can bring.” A drowned mother, a father so torn by grief that he would rather be wood than human. But how could she explain that to a man raised in Procampur, who thought the world was built on straight, narrow, and well-ordered lines. One who believed you could define people by the color of their roof tiles?

  “I will attack him alone,” decided Sanval, apparently forgetting that she was supposed to be the captain and the one giving the orders. She had known that was going to happen—she had just known it. “Then you will have time to escape,” the silver-roof noble concluded with a pleasant smile.

  “And do you think that you would survive such an attack?”

  “That does not matter.” Sanval sounded happier than she had ever heard him, which was very bothersome to her peace of mind.

  “What is the Procampur obsession with rushing in against all odds and getting yourself killed?” asked Ivy. She did not mean to sound harsh, but she did not want to fret about Sanval doing something suicidal. She had so many other things to worry about. “That is as idiotic as your city’s ban of the Thieves Guild.”

  “What is wrong with our ban of the Thieves Guild?” said Sanval, distracted by the sudden criticism of the rules of his beloved city, which was exactly what Ivy had wanted.

  “The ban on the Thieves Guild is unnatural, in my opinion,” Ivy said, warming to her argument on why Procampur’s citizens, especially the one sitting next to her, lacked basic good sense. “It is the same as expecting all the citizens in an entire city to come to an agreement to be honorable and deal fairly with others and not steal their goods.”

  “You would prefer to be robbed as you walked down the streets?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Or to be allowed to rob others.”

  “Not me personally, at least not friends and family. But governments and rulers are somewhat stingy and should probably be encouraged to share the wealth at times.”

  “So you are willing to rob others as long as you do not know them.”

  “And they can afford it. Never steal from the poor, they don’t have anything worth taking.” She waited for some response. Sanval’s features had settled back into the impassive, slightly stern expression that she knew so well. He did not speak. “That was a joke. But, honestly (or dishonestly if you prefer), thieves who are ruled by Thieves Guilds avoid stealing too much too close
to home. City officials supplement their pay with some nice bribes, and the world rolls on. Procampur has to be the only city to take the quaint view that all its visitors, as well as its citizens, should be free to wander wherever they want in the city without having their purses cut or their pockets picked.”

  “And does that make our quaint view wrong, because it is not true in other cities?” A touch of acid stung beneath his words. And if Sanval’s straight spine were any stiffer, Mumchance could have used it as a level. Worst of all, Sanval had gone from his impassive face to that straight-down-the-nose stare that he must have learned in the nursery beneath his mansion’s silver roof. It was precisely the look of rebuke that his ancestors must have been giving red-roof adventurers like herself for generations.

  Ivy could see a large philosophical hole opening before her—one that probably had a snake at the bottom of it. Which was confusing, because she knew that she had a winning argument when she had started out. A quick visual survey of her friends showed them all sitting there, resolutely silent, and waiting to see how she was going to finish the debate. She grimaced at the lack of verbal verification from those that she had expected to agree with her. Mumchance stared back with a very clear “you dig yourself out of this one” look. Zuzzara and Gunderal were leaning forward, Gunderal fluttering her eyelashes in some type of signal that puzzled Ivy. Even Kid, that hypocritical thief, looked disapproving of her argument. Wiggles just wagged her tail, obviously hoping that Ivy would shut up and somebody would feed the cute white dog sitting at their feet.