Crypt of the Moaning Diamond

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 opposition 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 until 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.

"Toram wished to find the ancient magic," explained Kid. "He said my kind had a greater sensitivity than others to such artifacts, both beneficial and destructive-especially the destructive kind. As I said, he taught me ways to feel out such objects, to know their history and how they work."

"Godsight?"

"That is what he and Archlis called it." Kid gave another twist of the silver serpent's wings and clicked his tongue when the wings did not move as he expected. "They were partners once."

"You did not mention that you knew Fottergrim's favorite spellcaster when we took the job."

"Archlis used another name when he worked with Toram. Besides, all humans look a bit alike to me. I did not recognize him until I saw Toram's Ankh in his hands and sniffed his scent. Then I realized how he had been throwing so many fireballs off the walls of Tsurlagol."

"What exactly did Archlis do to Toram?"

"He struck him down and left him to die in Anauroch." Kid's entire skin shivered, rather like a horse that had an unpleasant bug walk across its hide. "Archlis thought then that I would serve him as I had served Toram."

"But you didn't stay with him."

"I bit his hand to the bone. You can still see the scar if you look close," said Kid with grim satisfaction. "When he dropped me, I ran away as quickly as I could go."

Ivy remembered when she caught Kid picking her pockets.

"I guess I'm lucky that you didn't try biting off my hand."

"Oh no, my dear," said Kid in his usual gentle voice. He glanced at her, the stony look on his face softening. "I would never hurt you or the others. I told you, I have a great sensitivity to that which is destructive and that which is not. It is like this light." He passed one hand through the candle flame without flinching. "A warmth and comfort shone from you. It has never dimmed, but only grown stronger over the years."

Ivy did not know how to respond, and Kid seemed to expect no reply. With a nod of satisfaction, he pulled the wings apart repeatedly and then snapped them back together again. The belt floated toward the ceiling. Ivy grabbed it and pulled it back down again. Kid twisted the wings, and the belt lay still in their grasp.

"Pull the wings open three times and then shut," instructed Kid as he looped the belt around her waist and fastened the buckle. "And the belt flies. Twist twice to the right and then open to cease the spell."

"Maybe you should wear it." Magical items always made her a little nervous. Such objects rarely worked as she expected.

"No, my dear, it would better for you to have it. Archlis watches me closely, but he ignores you."

"So much for my pride."

"It is because he is a magelord, which means he is even more arrogant than the ordinary wizard," said Kid. "He sees only those who have mastered his brand of magic as a threat. All others are nothing to him. He knows that I knew some of Toram's secrets, but he only sees you as a fighter-someone of no value because they have no magic at all. He is a very foolish man, my dear."

"So, should we see if this works on a live body?"

"Open three times and then shut," Kid repeated, laying his hands over Ivy's gloved fingers to teach her the move.

Suddenly, her feet were no longer in contact with the floor. Ivy was pulled into a horizontal position, face down to the pile of rubble. She bobbed up in the air so quickly that she smacked the back of her head against the ceiling. The force of that blow bounced her back toward the floor. Kid jumped up and hooked one hand through the belt. Now both of them dangled off the ground, but not quite so high. Kid wiggled, and they bobbed up and down a little. Ivy could not feel her own weight or his. For the first time in her life, she was completely unable to tell where the ground was. Usually the earth was pressed against some part of her anatomy, such as the soles of her feet. She stared down. It was there and she was above it, but she could not sense it. If she closed her eyes, she doubted she could tell which direction was up and which was down. She felt like a cloud, just floating along, but without any wind to move her to the next spot.

Ivy bent her chin against her chest to peer cross-eyed at Kid hanging off her belt. "Now what do we do?"

"Try flying, my dear."

"How? Flap my arms?"

"Most probably."

"Of all the foolishness!" Ivy flapped her arms up and down. She kicked her legs. She stroked arm over shoulder like she was trying to swim through a river. Nothing worked. They just hung there, wobbling a bit, but making no noticeable progress in any one direction.

"There may be some other trick to it," said Kid, letting go of the belt and landing lightly on his feet next to the corpse. Without Kid's extra weight hanging off the belt, Ivy floated up to the ceiling. But this time she tucked her head and legs under so the only part that smacked the stone ceiling was her rump. She straightened out and looked down at Kid and the sharp rubble littering the floor.

"Twist twice to the right and then open to cease the spell," Kid reminded her.

"I'm going to fall hard on that pile of rocks. For the second time today," Ivy observed.

Above her, she could hear the scraping of stone upon stone. A tickle of air hit the back of her neck.

"They are prying open the trapdoor, my dear," Kid said. "Quick, or they will see you."

"The gods must truly despise me," Ivy said as she squeezed her eyes closed. "All right. Step back so I don't flatten you."

Tucking her head down on her chest and throwing one arm over her face, she twisted the wings twice to the right with her free hand and squeezed the buckle open. The earth became very evident and very hard as she banged with a teeth-rattling bump into the rubble and rolled across sharp-edged pebbles and potshards.

Above her, she could hear Mumchance calling, Wiggles yapping, and Kid replying, "We are here, dear sir, well enough and safe."

"Speak for yourself," mumbled Ivy, making sure that the scarlet belt was secure and tucked down under her weapons belt. "Next time we get to town, remind me to get some extra protection from falling spells."

"That is it!" said Kid, turning away from the rope that Mumchance had thrown down.

"What's it?" Ivy brushed the dust and less pleasant debris from her gloves.

"The purpose of the belt. It keeps you from falling or sends you falling upward."

"Upward falling?" Ivy turned that phrase over in her brain and decided it just made her head hurt. "How about we just say it makes you float in the air."

"And anyone else grasping it! The belt must have been made to hold up more than one man-or maybe a very fat man."

"We'll talk about it later," Ivy hushed him. She strode under the trapdoor and looked up at Mumchance.

"Couldn't bear to leave me behind?" she called to the dwarf in a mocking tone.

"Wasn't you," replied the dwarf in a much drier tone, his scarred face wrinkled up in a worried frown. "Archlis wants Kid. But he said we could pull you out too if we were quick about it."

"In that case, I'm going first, and Kid can follow." She grabbed the rope with both hands and shimmied out of the hole. Not surprisingly, as she came out of the hole, she saw that Zuzzara had the other end of the rope tied around her waist and was standing there like a stone pillar, unruffled by the tug of Ivy's weight.

Sanval reached out and helped steady her as she stepped out of the hole. "You are well? Is that another scrape on your face?"

"I fell through a hole and landed on rock rubble. Mildly uncomfortable. Not dead yet," she replied. He started to say something but stopped and just gave her a small bow. She nodded back at him. Stuck underground, surrounded by enemies, his formality never stopped. It must be that gleaming armor that keeps him so stiff and proper, she thought.

"Anything down there?" asked Gunderal, watching her sister lean over the hole and haul Kid up on the rope, like a fish through an ice hole.

"Just rubble and an old dead body. Nothing exciting," said Ivy. "What about up here?"

"Archlis says we have to walk very quietly now," said Zuzzara. "And not talk too loudly."

"At least he didn't ask the impossible, like no talking at all."

"No, Ivy, he said that doesn't matter. They will hear us just by our footfalls on the stone when we get close enough," Gunderal sounded even more worried than usual.

"Who would they be?" Ivy was certain that she would not like the answer.

"He says that we have to see to understand," said Gunderal. "But, Ivy, whatever it is, I can tell that it troubles him. What could frighten a magelord with as much magic as Archlis has?"