My friends had been laughing at first, less so when I smacked my head on the ceiling, and not at all when my right shoulder got smacked into the doorframe.
Flarinen’s shocked face was the last I saw as we finally made it out the door.
“Come back here!” Covey was the fastest runner of the bunch, even putting the elves to shame, but even she was starting to fade as the faeries picked up speed.
“Seriously, I don’t think Garbage wanted you to pick me up.” I shut my eyes; the speed they were going wasn’t normal and was making me have second thoughts about my breakfast.
None of the faeries answered aside from some laughter, but before I’d shut my eyes, they’d all seemed focused and determined.
Great, so Nivinal, or maybe Reginald, caught the other faeries and these were what, going to trade me for them?
I popped my eyes open as we started to slow down and dropped into one of the few gorges left after the change when we went back in time. It looked suspiciously like the canyons we’d come through before we were spelled into Null, but I knew the faeries couldn’t have flown that far that quickly.
I shut my eyes again as they flew down a hole, no bumping this time, but the hairs on my arms were standing up and felt how close we were to the rock sides.
A wave of cooler air hit me, and I was dumped in a pile of fabric and leaves.
“Very good, ladies. You did far better than I could have hoped. Come get your treats.”
The voice was low and gravely, and I had a bad feeling I knew the species.
I opened my eyes to find an old syclarion peering right into mine.
31
The knife he held between us didn’t lessen my bad feelings.
“Where are the rest of my faeries?” I assumed he’d captured Bunky and the gargoyle as well, but I couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten this group to help him. Unless this really was a trade situation.
The area that I could see, past the scary syclarion and his knife, was far more forest than desert. The sound of running water was also odd. Maybe an oasis? I knew Covey had long ago speculated that there were entire peoples living in the vast desert, surviving in oasies. The fact that I was about to die in one didn’t offset the fact she was right.
“What did Dueble pack in your satchel?”
I looked closer into his eyes. He wasn’t as old as I thought, and there appeared to be stage make-up adding to his aged appearance. I knew those eyes.
“Dueble?” I almost hugged him, but that knife was in my face.
“What was in the pack?”
“Clothing. You packed our clothing.” I pulled at the tunic I wore. “This and more. The red tunic and the leather armor. You packed that.” I couldn’t recall any of the other specific things, but that one stood out.
He grinned and lowered the blade. “I am sorry for the mode of your arrival and doubting it was you. But it has been over a thousand years since we last met, and Nasif was worried that someone might pretend to be you. We have to be very cautious you know. There are people who would love to find us.”
“You both survived?”
He reached out a hand to help me to my feet. I was dizzy from my inelegant mode of transportation so I needed it. The area we were in was an oasis, of sorts. Smaller gapen trees, huge by normal tree standards, small by their own, surrounded us. A gurgling river, looking robust for being in the middle of the desert, ran through the area, and lush plant life covered everything. “Is this place real?”
“Yes, and yes. Nasif will be sorry he missed your arrival, but he had his own important things to attend to. Some of your faeries went with him, some stayed here, and some retrieved you.” Dueble beamed and I saw the young, and mostly confused, syclarion I’d met a thousand years ago. Although to me it had been less than two days.
I hugged him. And was immediately surrounded by faeries and two gronking constructs.
“Is good!” Garbage seemed particularly pleased with herself. I knew that in her wee brain, she’d done this all herself.
“Yes, sweetie, it’s good.” I looked around some more. A pair of houses to the side were at first hidden by the trees. Both simple, but looked sturdy and made mostly of stone. The one on the left had a tendril of smoke from its chimney. It was quite a bit cooler here in this oasis, or whatever it was, than in Null.
“Where are my manners? We never have guests anymore. Please, come inside,” Dueble said and nodded to the faeries and constructs, “all of you. I’ll get some tea and snacks in you, then we’ll catch up.”
I started following him. “No tea for the faeries please. Unless you want them to destroy this lovely place.”
He opened the door. “Actually, I found that out the hard way.” Inside the beautiful stone cabin was a tiny cage and a bouncy Crusty Bucket. “She got into it before Nasif could warn me. The bars are of the hardest metal known. Even then, at first I feared it wouldn’t hold her.”
I bent down to look at my tiny blue faery. She smiled and talked at me, but she spoke so fast I had no idea what she was saying. “How long ago did she have it?” I nodded to Crusty, but that made her talk faster.
“A few hours ago, when they first came here.” He looked down at the cage sadly then turned toward the small sitting room and motioned to an overstuffed chair.
“How did Nasif know about the tea? We only discovered that a few months ago.” Speaking of tea, Dueble had a steaming cup of the substance in my hand almost the moment I sat. He also had a tray of biscuits.
“Siabiane told him some tips for dealing with the faeries. Nasif and I arrived in the enclave the day after you left. He was planning on tracking you down, but she explained that none of you had met us yet and that we needed to wait. It was also decided to glamour me until things settled down.”
A look of sadness crossed his long face. He really was so different from the rest of his people in this timeline.
The stone cottage was immaculate, but also looked established. Like hundreds of years established. “How long have you been here? What happened to you both during the fireball?”
He smiled. “The whole of it is a long tale, for Nasif and I have been in this area for almost the full thousand years since you left us. The fireball was impressive, was it not? He’s only gotten better since then. Of course, we’ve had to stay low-key, and not cause notice—at least that’s what Nasif’s research found.”
I sipped some tea hoping that the confusion his words brought on would be fixed. I took another sip, and a third. Nope—still confused.
“Oh dear, I did it again. As I said, we don’t entertain much. Nasif and I were caught in the fireball, but we didn’t die. The time spell grabbed us. We were trapped in a limbo pocket for one hundred and three years. When we dropped out of it, our attackers were obviously gone. However, so was Siabiane and the entire city. The battle with the Dark was long over and it looked like no one won. The palace was in ruins and the other races were moving in. Nasif searched but never found signs of his people, so we believed the stories that they had all died, like the Ancients before them.”
He refilled my tea, but his eyes were far from this stone cottage.
“We roamed. My people had all fled, and the syclarions back in my homeland were war-like and violent. We traveled and researched. Null was of great interest. It’s not natural, you know. Well, the way it was wasn’t natural. The faeries are right; you and Alric did change it back.”
More tea wasn’t helping me understand time travel implications. I put my cup down and went for a biscuit. Maybe that would help. “If we changed it back to what it was, then who changed it in the first place? The town looked like it had been that way for a long time.”
“We have debated that for quite a while. This glen is a pocket, sort of like the bubble spell Lorcan put on your friends when you and Alric were in my time. Because of the pocket nature we saw things change differently. But the time waves that seemed to have been a major contributor to the wrongness were around even when we
got here. Something long ago caused the time waves to gather, and caused Null.”
“Did they also cause the weird spell that sent us to Null?” I hadn’t had enough time between when we arrived in Null and going back a thousand years to ask Lorcan, but it hadn’t seemed like he or Padraig had any idea what caused us to be sucked into the spell that ended with a one-way, at the time, trip to Null.
“That is a good question and one we’ve been trying to resolve. The spell is old, even older than we are. Yet neither Nasif nor I recall it being in our time, but we know it must have been. It could be that the spell exists out of time. Time is far more fluid than one would think, you know.”
I smiled and had another biscuit. Like the tea, they weren’t helping, but they tasted good and if my mouth was full I couldn’t ask stupid questions like, ‘what?’
“You are doing it again, aren’t you, my boy?” The voice coming from the door was a little rougher, but it was one I knew.
Garbage got to him first. “They get! Told you.” I turned to find her pointing at me. Her smug grin grew as Nasif, his beard much longer now, handed over some lumps of sugar.
“You were right, wee one! They did it without you or your two lieutenants.”
As he spoke Leaf came buzzing from behind his pack. “I help too!” She led three of the other faeries into the sitting area where they started jumping and jabbering with the rest.
I got up and ran to hug him. Then stepped back and looked at him and Dueble. “You both have been running about for a thousand years. Your beard is longer but neither of you are showing any age—ignoring Dueble’s stage make-up. I know elves are long lived but even Lorcan and Siabiane look older now than they did then.”
“Plus, I am not a full elf, and Dueble is a syclarion—a species whose life span is about two hundred years, give or take. Good observations.” He patted Crusty’s cage, but her chatter was almost out of hearing range so he took a cup of tea and sat down in the seating area.
“The blast of that last fireball did knock us out of time for a while, as I’m sure Dueble told you. It also changed both of us. Near as I can tell, and in conferring with Siabiane, she seems to agree, we’re both immortal now. Something that caused the time waves in Null pulled into us back then. It changed our make up at the most basic level.”
“So…” I shook my head and gave up. There was no way I could sum up what he said.
“I think both of us have been away from people for too long,” Dueble said. “I am not the only one confusing her.”
“No, it makes sense…really.” I quickly drank some more tea.
“Once we explain it to Lorcan and Padraig it will make more sense.” Nasif looked around as if just noticing there was only Dueble and I in the stone cottage. “Where are the rest?”
Dueble gave him a raised eyebrow. “It was hard enough getting the faeries to carry her in. Do you really think they could bring in the rest?”
“We probably want to do something though. We were making plans to go after the relics and Reginald. They are going to be a bit upset about me being carted off like that.”
Nasif had started stroking his beard as I spoke, but choked when I said Reginald.
“Siabiane told me what happened to Lorcan. I never saw him while we were there, but it was a short trip. So the Lorcan with you is a ghost? Or is really Reginald?” It took him a few minutes to untangle his fingers from his beard.
“It’s Lorcan. Reginald dropped control of Lorcan’s body and Lorcan’s ghost took it back. Reginald is now in the body of a dwarf, Mackil, but it’s believed that he’s not able to hop anymore.” I looked at both of them. It was wonderful to see them, especially when we all assumed they’d died in the fireball. “If you knew we were here, why didn’t you go into town? Dueble said you were afraid of a copy of me?”
Nasif looked embarrassed. “I have a fear of changelings. We ran afoul of them a few dozen years past and I’ve never fully gotten over it.” He covered his feelings by pulling on his beard. It seemed to be his go to reaction and it did work much better with the full beard he now had.
“We had a problem with some of them a few months back, so I understand. But we probably need to go back into town and tell everyone I’m okay.”
Both of them looked uncomfortable.
Nasif finally answered. “The truth is neither of us go into Null anymore. It might have to do with our unique condition and the nuances of the place itself. But both of us become physically ill if we go there.”
That would complicate things, although they might not have tried since the changes happened. “How far away from Null are we? It felt like we were flying for a while.” A long distance would also complicate things. I knew a number of people would be extremely happy at seeing these two, but we also needed to stay in Null until we got the relics back. My thinking was that even one of the relics would work for now; it would stop them from assembling the thing. Preferably the gargoyle or the chimera, the dragon could stay where it was forever in my book. Nivinal couldn’t put the weapon together without all of them. I didn’t want the one inside me to be the only one he didn’t have. The more we could get back from him the safer I would feel.
“That was the faeries doing, although I did ask them to take a longer route,” Dueble said. “This oasis is hidden not a few minutes from the outskirts of Null. We’re in a canyon that is protected by Nasif’s spells. No one can see it unless we allow them.” He was so proud about the spell. It was as if it was his spell and not Nasif’s.
I was happy these two survived, and even more so that they seemed to have become extremely close over the centuries. Being immortal and thinking you were cut off from all of your people would be extremely difficult—having someone else who knew exactly what you were going through had to be the only thing keeping them both sane.
“Then can I go lead the rest back here? How will I find my way back if it’s hidden?” I finished my last biscuit and tea.
“I’ll go with you, but only to the edge of Null.” Nasif also finished his tea.
“I fear the reputation of my people—both during the battle with the Dark and in current times, makes my appearance awkward. We were using glamours but I became immune to them a few decades ago.” Dueble pointed to his make-up. “This can only do so much.”
“You can become immune to a spell?” That was news to me.
“It is possible, but it takes an extremely long time for it to happen.” Nasif squinted his eyes and looked at Dueble. “Although, if anyone could modify the spell to work on Dueble again, Padraig would be the one.”
I went over to the table. The faeries had gathered on the desk and at some point Bunky and the gargoyle had joined them. The two constructs were silently sitting next to Crusty’s cage listening to her jabbering. She did appear to be slowing down. Cage or not, I was bringing her with us. I trusted these two with my life a thousand years ago. Those feelings hadn’t changed. But I wanted to keep everyone together at this point.
“Crusty? How are you feeling?”
She finished her current jabber, which didn’t appear to be directed at anyone, and then spun toward me. “Good. Is good. No zoom.”
“She say that Bunky told her.” Leaf had been engaged in some odd little game nearby, but came over. “Bunky saw no zoom, no cage.”
I lifted an eyebrow in Bunky’s direction. “Is that true? You’re telling her how to get out? You know that if we let her out and she’s hopped up on tea she’s going to be impossible to keep track of.” I didn’t understand Bunky, but I knew he understood me.
He gronked and bobbed his head.
“He say he watch,” Leaf said, then went back to her game.
“You’ll take care of her if I let her out?” I didn’t really have a choice; the cage was heavier than I’d originally thought.
Again a gronk and what I was going to take as an affirmative nod. I peered down closer to Crusty. Her movements had slowed down, and she was no longer jabbering like a broken wind-up to
y, but her wings were flapping a bit much.
“Can you settle down? Bunky will keep an eye on you. No ale for a month if you go tearing off.” I wasn’t sure she had much control over her speed if she was reacting to the tea. I also wasn’t sure she even knew what a month was. But a solemn look crossed her face as she nodded. It didn’t stay long enough for me to respond, but at least it had been there.
I unlocked the cage.
Crusty slowly walked out onto the table and headed for her friends. Then spun around and took off for the door. That it was shut only slowed her a little. The going through solid objects stunt the faeries seemed to be able to do sometimes, but not always, was disturbing to watch. It was like the back half of her slowly disappeared into the wood.
I ran to the door and flung it open. She hadn’t gone far but was zipping around too fast for normal. “Okay, Bunky. She’s all yours. You two need to get her and yourselves back to the house in Null. Understand?”
He gronked, bobbed, and tore out after the blue streak bouncing from tree to tree.
Dueble, Nasif, and the rest of the faeries came out as well.
“Go get?” Garbage had a particularly aggressive look in her eye as she pointed to Crusty and the trees.
“No, she’s fine. I need you to make sure we’re safe going back.” It might have only taken fifteen years but I had finally figured out that making Garbage an important member of any event went a long way in getting her to do something. When it worked, anyway.
“Is good, we lead,” she said then pointed to Nasif. “You follow.”
I started to point out that I didn’t know how to get out of this place when twenty-two faeries all grabbed me. “No! This isn’t the way. Nasif! Tell them to put me down!” Of course by then I was at a height I really didn’t want them to put me down from.
“I’ll wait for all of you at the edge of Null!” Nasif yelled as we quickly flew out of sight.
The Golden Basilisk (The Lost Ancients Book 5) Page 25