Crypt of the Moaning Diamond (33 page)

“I lied,” Ivy admitted. “Heroics are fine.” She grinned at Sanval as she reached around him to smack the backside of a startled archer who had wandered into this section of the wall seeking his friends. The barbarian fled with a yell for reinforcements.

“Watch out!” Sanval dived past Ivy, ramming another screaming ore over the wall before the trooper could brain Gunderal with his warhammer. The pretty wizard gave Sanval a sparkling smile as she ducked around her big sister to help trip up two ores attacking Zuzzara.

Swinging his blade at another ore, Sanval sliced it below the knees. The creature lost its balance and toppled into space. Sanval and Ivy pivoted around each other to strike more attacking ores.

“Ask me what mercenaries and red-roof girls have in common,” she said, reaching past him with her stolen halberd to crack an ore across the side of his head.

“Nothing at all,” Sanval exclaimed, glancing at her with a most peculiar smile that lit up his dark eyes. He jabbed away at an oncoming hobgoblin.

“Do too,” she laughed. “Both always figuring out every move. Both more fun than an entire room full of proper Procampur ladies. Don’t for a moment think that I did not have a plan in my back pocket for everything that happened in the ruins.”

“There goes Archlis,” Zuzzara said, pointing with her shovel. She gave a formidable whack on the top of the head to a poor little goblin sneaking around them, obviously a stray still seeking an escape route off the creaking, groaning wall. Fottergrim had retreated even farther back, so he stood in the doorway of the farthest watchtower, screaming some type of order over his shoulders.

“Look! He really can fly!” said Gunderal.

Incredibly for a creature of its bulk, the tiny wings lifted the demon Archlis off the wall. His feet hung no mote than a half a man’s height above the surface. As he lifted off the wall, Norimgic and Osteroric took one look at the ores bearing down on them and then leaped after Archlis, each grabbing a long arm. Archlis gave a roar and shook his hands, but the screaming bugbears held tight. Bobbing and weaving, Archlis began a ponderous flight off the wall. The bugbears dangled off his arms, both paddling their big flat feet like swimmets, as though hoping to keep themselves afloat.

“It would appear that flight is a good choice, with perhaps a touch of magic?” Kid tugged at her waist, and Ivy realized that rather than pulling her out of the way, he was trying to get her attention by dragging the red magic belt out from where it was tucked down behind her weapons belt.

“That’s a good idea,” observed Ivy, thrusting the halberd’s tip through the breastplate of an ore. She bent her knee and pressed the sole of her boot against the ore’s armor to pull the halberd free from the dead creature. With a grunt, she stated, “Let’s follow him down.”

“I am pleased that Osteroric escaped,” said Sanval, close on her heels as she headed for the edge. “He and his brother were rather civilized for bugbears.”

“And their pockets are still stuffed with jewels, which is more than what we got,” mourned Mumchance.

“We’ll just add it to the ThultyrPs invoice,” declared Ivy. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

Ivy jumped up on the edge of the wall. Looking straight down, she had a clear view of the ground, a long, long way below her. Piles of dead ores with twisted limbs and shattered heads and bodies testified to the height. Ivy stood on the ledge, teetered forward, then stepped back and beckoned her crew. “Grab my belt!” she yelled.

“I don’t understand,” Sanval began.

“Trust me,” she said, looking down at Sanval. Despite all the dust and rust and assorted grime that they had picked up that day, his upturned face just shone with honesty, bravery, and all those other fine Procampur qualities. The man did not need highly polished armor to dazzle her. Sanval smiled up at her.

“Ivy!” Zuzzara and Mumchance and Kid shouted together, with Kid adding a gentle, “My dear.”

Startled, she swung around to look at them, then completed the turn to look in the direction they all pointed.

Archlis as the demon Nalfeshnee beat his wings frantically, trying to distance himself from the battlements. But he was sinking. The huge creature looked like some six-legged, three-headed bat that could not fly very well. The bugbears, dangling from the giant monster’s arms, their legs churning, weren’t helping. Tossing their considerable weight in their terror, and swinging their weapons and occasionally pricking the demon’s hairy body, they howled and screamed and blubbered. The bugbear brothers had been brave fighters when grounded, but flying was not something any bugbear ever yearned to do.

“We need to get out of here!” Mumchance had finally caught Wiggles. Tucking the little dog firmly into his pocket, the dwarf nimbly avoided one of the falling ores who had just been brained by Zuzzara’s wildly swinging shovel.

“Got a plan!” screamed Ivy. “Everyone to me! To me!”

“Coming, my dear,” said Kid, as he leaped up and drummed another ore on its snout with his sharp hooves. The creature let out a howl and clapped both hairy hands over its injured proboscis.

“What are you going to do?” Sanval asked, backhanding an ore trying to detain him as he climbed up on the edge of the wall next to her. Ivy was holding herself steady by wrapping one arm around a wooden pillar supporting the burned-out roof.

“Grab my belt!” Ivy screamed at him over the noise of the fight behind them. There was such confusion that Fottergrim’s gray ores and mountain ores were busy trying to brain each other—each group was convinced that the others had started the fight that now engulfed the top of the wall. The battered Fottergrim was howling orders at all of them, but nobody could hear him over the general hubbub. The hobgoblins who had come late to the fight, following the orange goblins into the fray, jabbed with their spiked shields. The ores crouched below them, red eyes gleaming, and thrashed their halberds like scythes. The hobgoblins shouted to each other, closing ranks, occasionally saving each other with a sword thrust, and occasionally overreaching and stabbing one of their own kind.

“My belt!” Ivy yelled at Sanval. All the other Siegebreakers had figured it out, but he had not been there for the fight with the destrachans. She could feel Zuzzara’s big hand firmly anchored in her weapons belt. The big half-ore had snatched up her little sister and tucked Gunderal under her other arm. Mumchance and Kid each had their hands locked on her legs. Ivy let go of the wooden post and grabbed the silver buckle of the narrow red belt that she wore loosely below her heavy weapons belt. “Pull the wings open three times and then shut,”

she whispered to herself as her fingers caught the small silver wings. She twisted them and prayed to whatever gods might be listening that the belt’s magic would hold them all up. It had worked well underground, lifting her out of the reach of the destrachans, but she had been the only weight to lift. Now there was a lot more weight hanging off her, and she prayed that her weapons belt would hold and that her pants would stay up. That would be all that she needed—to plunge to her death baring her ass to the fighting ores and screaming hobgoblins behind her. Then again, it wasn’t that bad of a final fate, she decided. It would be a way to leave the world with a certain ragged style.

Either way, Ivy just had to trust that her luck (and her belt) would hold.

“Jump!” she screamed at Sanval as she snagged his collar with her free hand and pulled him off balance. His booted feet shot out and up, his arms flew up, his fist tightened around his sword hilt, and his dark curls blew every which way.

Ivy plunged off the wall.

The belt’s magic was strained, but not broken. Rather than shooting toward the sky, they dropped, jerked level, and then started to gently descend to the ground.

Sanval hung straight down from his collar, where Ivy held him in a tight grip, his body rigid, his arms and legs pointing hopefully toward the earth, his face a frozen blank. He made a slight choking sound, and Ivy tried to shift her grip so she would not strangle him before they hit the ground.

Zuzzara had let out a single huge bellow when they leaped off the wall. Ivy looked down at the half-ore, dangling from her white-knuckled grip on Ivy’s heavy weapons belt. Beads of perspiration popped out on the half-ore’s forehead. Zuzzara was as pale as Ivy had ever seen her. Suspended with Zuzzara’s arm around her waist, Gunderal looked like some pretty bird, her body perpendicular to the ground, her arms stretched out like wings, her hair and skirts fluttering around her. She seemed to be shaking with soft laughter.

Ivy looked past them to the two hanging on her legs. Mumchance was staring at the ground, or was that his good eye that he had squeezed closed? Wiggles was a lump in his pocket, not even an ear sticking up over the edge. Kid clung to

her other leg, and it did not surprise Ivy to see him look up at her, wink, then grin at the floating Gunderal.

They sank slowly, spiraling down in an odd zigzag pattern, and then they all hit the ground in a tumble of legs and arms.

“Oooh,” Gunderal moaned, flattened beneath her big sister.

“Sorry,” Zuzzara said, rolling off her onto all fours. She pushed herself upright and pulled her little sister into a standing position.

“Its all right,” said Gunderal. She smoothed down the front of her skirt and ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it back from her face. Her blue-black curls fluffed obediently into perfect ringlets, with highlighted streaks of blue and aquamarine framing her pearly features. “Good fighting up there, big sister.”

Zuzzara shrugged. “It’s what I do best!” Imitating Gundetal, she straightened her waistcoat and shook her head so that her many braids swung out, the iron beads clattered, and the braids fell neatly into place. She smiled weakly and wiped the perspiration from her face with het hand. “Give me a hundred hobgoblins every day, as long as I never have to fly.”

“No, it was wonderful,” Gunderal said with a little laugh. “I must get a new spellbook—one with flying spells in it.”

“How could you like that? You are water genasi, not ait genasi!” said a surprised Zuzzara.

“Oh, you remember daddy. He always leaped before he looked. I must have inherited a love of flying from him,” replied the little sister.

“Shut up and grab me!” Ivy shouted, as everyone released his or her hold. What was the stupid spell to make the belt stop, she wondered, as she once more began to drift skyward.

“Twist twice to the right and then open it, my dear,” Kid called, grabbing at het leg as she started to float up. A heavy,

Solid, most welcome weight of steady Procampur hands fell on her shoulders, pushing her back down until her feet touched ground. Ivy glanced around quickly while her fingers worked at the belt buckle.

Mumchance had been right about their location. They had landed at the southwest juncture of Tsurlagol’s walls—the very point that the Siegebreakers had originally identified as a weak spot. Above them Fottergrim was screaming at a bunch of barbarian archers, driving them into place along the shattered edge of the wall. Across a field were Procampur’s forces, obviously readying themselves for a charge against the same wall.

“I know it hasn’t been two days,” grumbled Ivy as she twisted the clasp of the belt. “Twice to the right, then open. Twice to the right, then open. Ah, blast. If I wanted to be a bird, I would have grown wings.”

Only Sanval’s strong grip on her shoulder and Kid’s firm clasp on her thigh were keeping her on the ground. The stupid belt was tugging her toward the sky again. She fumbled the buckle and wondered exactly how high she would go without a ceiling to stop her, if their grip slipped.

“Breathe,” whispered Sanval in her ear. “You have won. You have saved us all. Do not panic now.”

She rather suspected he used the same murmuring voice to calm his horses, but it worked. Her heart rate slowed, her own hands stopped fumbling at the clasp. She grasped the belt buckle ornament firmly, her fingers tightening on the little silver wings of the serpent, and the ancient metal crumbled under her hand. The narrow red belt slipped from around her waist and shot up into the clouds with a little whistling noise, rather like a child’s jeer at adult authority.

The barbarian archers on the wall saw it, their heads turning and tilting back in unison to track the red whip of belt. They all knelt to a firing position, one knee down, and lifted

their crossbows. Their arms snapped back to grab bolts from the quivers strapped between their shoulder blades, and with the speed of a blink, they filled the sky with bolts. Perhaps they thought the belt was some wily mercenary trick, meant to magically bring down the wall. The archers followed the belt’s path with flying bolts until it rose beyond their reach and disappeared into the sky.

“Good riddance,” panted Ivy, who could feel a whole new set of bruises around her waist where the pull of the belt had crushed her chain mail against her. The cavalry across the field was obviously getting into formation. Banners were raised, snapping in the wind. She could hear the faint echoes of the big war drums being pounded, so the various leaders of the horse-mounted troops would know their position. “What is Enguettand ttying to do? He can’t be charging the gate on this side. That won’t work. I told him that wouldn’t work.”

She glared at Sanval, as though expecting an explanation. He stared at the Procampur cavalry through narrowed eyes. “I do not think that he has an extra plan in his back pocket,” worried Sanval.

“Look,” Kid whispered, and Ivy felt his hand brush her elbow. Turning to see where Kid pointed, she saw the giant Nalfeshnee do a crash landing, its wings beating. It rolled in a furry tumble with the two bugbears.

“Any moment now, my dear,” Kid added.

While they watched, the giant demon disappeared. There was no puff of smoke, no shooting sparks, just all at once gone.

“What happened?” Ivy asked.

“Very short term spell, my dear,” Kid said. “Another few moments and he would have changed while still in the air.” “Let me guess. Another artifact that he stole from Toram.” “Oh yes,” said Kid. “I rather hoped that he would ctash.”