the ledge, but she shook her head.
'I need to see the water, Ivy, just to keep my spell anchored in this room.'
'All right. Zuzzara, do you have that rope we found earlier?'
'Wound around my waist,' the half-orc affirmed. 'Do you need it?'
'Tie one end to my belt and get ready to haul me up when I yell. Now I am going to wait for the beasts to get here.' Ivy cut off their anticipated arguments. 'No, I stay on the floor here. I'm the bait. I'm going to keep them down here, and Gunderal is going to get that river to rise faster, so it's over their heads before they know what is happening.'
'But what about you?' worried Zuzzara.
'I've got a few tricks,' said Ivy, straightening the red leather belt around her waist so she could easily reach the silver buckle. 'And if my tricks don't work, you are going to haul me up like a fish on line. As fast as you can.'
'All right,' said Zuzzara.
'And how are you going to get the beasts to come to you?' queried Mumchance.
'I am going to sing!'
'Oh, Ivy.' Gunderal shuddered, and even Mumchance winced once they realized what she was intending to do. Both of them were fairly musical. Zuzzara, who had inherited her orc mother's taste for music (which consisted of exactly no opinion at all), just bobbed her head in a quick nod of agreement and began unwinding the rope around her waist. She started to thread one end through Ivy's belt.
'Don't tie the rope to that skinny red belt,' Ivy instructed her. 'Around my weapons belt. I don't want to pull the other one off.' Zuzzara tied the knot where Ivy had pointed.
'Ivy, are you sure about this?' Gunderal asked, leaning perilously out so she could see her friend.
'Absolutely. Kid and I found a little extra magic back in the tunnels that is going to help.' Ivy pulled off her gloves and secured them in her weapons belt. She placed her bare fingers on the winged serpent clasp of the magic belt that she had retrieved from the floating corpse. If it worked as it had before, she should be able to float right out of the creatures' reach.
'Wait one moment,' Gunderal said, leaving the ledge and coming down the stairs with a quick patter of little feet across the stone steps. 'Does anyone have a candle?'
'I don't need a candle,' Ivy said, who had a lit torch in one hand and her sword in the other.
'But I do. Zuzzara, light this for me.' Gunderal pulled one of the candles that they had looted from the bugbear out of her robes and handed it to her sister.
After Zuzzara had lit the candle, Gunderal held her hand beneath its drips until her fingertip was covered with wax. She reached out, touched Ivy, and said, 'That should do.'
'What's that for?' Ivy asked.
'We know the destrachans hunt by sound, but how can we know if they have a sense of smell? Perhaps not, but still, I think you will be safer without any smell.'
'I have heard of wizards removing odor from smelly beasts and dead bodies, but come on, Gunderal, I don't stink that bad!' Ivy objected.
'Most beasts can pick up any scent, no matter how small, and now you have none at all.'
Ivy grinned. 'Great! I'll never have to bathe again!'
Gunderal said sadly, 'It's a weak spell, Ivy. It will only last a short while.'
Ivy shrugged. 'I plan to finish those monsters quickly.'
'Well, if you're actually going to sing, that should drive them mad,' said Mumchance. The dwarf scooped up Wiggles and put the little dog in his pocket. He tugged on Gunderal's hand. 'Come on, girl, you need to call that river.'
As they climbed higher on the stairs, Zuzzara followed them, paying out rope as she went.
'Oh, how I am going to sing!' Ivy said to her friends' retreating backs. 'I am going to sing every red-roof ballad that I've learned this summer. If those beasts are as sensitive to sound as Archlis said, they should come rushing to devour me before I get to the first chorus!'
Above Ivy, Gunderal began chanting, her call to the river echoing around the room The smell of water filled the air. Ivy waited until the river began to bubble faster through the broken spouts of the fountain, filling the basin and frothing over her boots. Then she stood with elbows out and fists on her waist, tilted her head back, took a deep breath, and started to sing.
'Procampur men are deadly dull, but Procampur girls are fancy loves.' Ivy had never quite figured out all the more obscure slang in the chorus-a rousing ditty about ladies who switched their roof tiles to suit their loves-but Sanval had blanched the first time that he had heard her sing it and muttered something about 'duels are being fought for lesser insults.' Now Ivy pitched her voice loud and strong, to send the echoes clashing through the carved rock of the chamber. The sound reverberated even better than singing at the top of her lungs in the bathhouse back at the farm (a favorite trick for keeping the place all to herself and avoiding certain people fussing about whether or not she was rinsing her hair out properly).
Gunderal continued to call upon the river to rise. She stood on the ledge above Ivy, her hands held out. Thin glittering strands of light bounced around the chamber, shimmering across her blue-black cloud of hair. Her violet eyes shone in her delicate face. As her gentle genasi mother had taught her so long ago, Gunderal sang the song of water. The lightning scent of the storm became interwoven with the cool, sweet smell of rain falling from the sky to the dusty earth below, the darker tang of an old river carrying that same rain through the heart of a mountain, and-not too far away-the pull of the sharp salt scent of the sea. She sang about how the sea's rich perfume could lure the river out of its old meandering ways and send it hunting, like an elderly blundering hound trailing a fox's scent, into the tunnels and ruins of ancient Tsurlagol.
The water poured faster out of the fountain, washing against the tops of Ivy's boots, and the bard's tone-deaf daughter continued to shout-sing her way through the many verses of the Procampur song, describing the lovers preferred under each roof. Ivy had sung all the way to the third verse when the floor of the chamber began to shake.
Parts of the wall that she was facing began to dissolve into dust as a raggedy-eared, nasty-looking, blind head came pushing through the newly formed hole, a head that was nothing more than an enormous open circle of mouth. There were no teeth, no eyes, and mere breathing slits where the nose should be, with no sort of bone structure to its face that could be bashed with a well-aimed blow. The only large feature on the head, besides the wide-open maw, were the ears. They were shaped a bit like winter-dead tree leaves, folding into three sections with deep indentations and sharp points all around their edges. Each ear twitched wildly in opposite directions.
A second head shoved into the hole above the first one, and a third popped up through a newly formed crack in the floor.
The first beast clawed at its own ears as Ivy continued to bellow. The echoes in the chamber made it sound like more than a dozen singers were caterwauling in different corners of the room, all completely out of tune, and a beat or two behind each other. The creatures butted and banged against each other as they squeezed into the room.
The destrachans had found her, and they seemed killing mad about her singing, as Mumchance had predicted.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As the destrachans came shrieking into the room, the river continued to rise. Each creature was anyone's worst nightmare, almost as large as the hen house at the farm. Worse still were the weird reverberating screams being given by the monsters-howls so ugly that each cry echoed in Ivy's head, making her back teeth ache.
The lead monster moved in a crouch, its back legs bent, and its front legs reaching out. Muscles rippled from its jaw to its humped back and down past the powerful haunches to its heavy pointed tail. Its thick hide looked waterproof, and Ivy wondered again if destrachans could swim. Or float. That would mess up her plans rather badly. The creature's talons curved out from its feet like blades. That it was blind in no way lessened its powers, and there was no way at all of knowing how sensitive it was to movement. Certainly it was aware of her singing,
