I didn’t pick up on that thought until I was almost at the dig site.
And had to fight my way through a crowd of pushing diggers to get to the front.
A medic was checking on Thaddeus, and while extremely dusty, he seemed to have all of his limbs intact. The same couldn’t be said for our dig.
The tunnel had completely collapsed. All that was left was a small dent in the ground and a lot of churned up earth.
“What happened?” I fought the urge to run to the dig itself and instead forced myself to check on Thaddeus.
“Oh, child, thank goodness you weren’t here. It was awful. I barely got out with my life.”
Thaddeus hadn’t gotten out completely unscathed, a long trail of blood indicated where he’d been struck by something heavy near his temple. Luckily, dwarven heads were harder than diamonds. A blow like that could have killed me.
“The dig collapsed? I thought we’d reinforced everything…” I couldn’t help it—I started to drift toward the former tunnel.
Thaddeus pushed aside the medic mage and grabbed my hand before I could go far. “I wouldn’t go near there. We had the stoutest timber, yet whoever caused this brought it down like matchsticks. No one can go near there until an inquiry and investigation has been done.”
All I could think of was all the potentially amazing finds that had been in that room we’d almost gotten into. Wait, what did he say?
“This was deliberate? Someone pulled down the tunnel? Why? We weren’t even sure if we found anything.”
Thaddeus patted me on the shoulder and skillfully turned me away from the ruins. “I know, dear. It’s hard to take. But someone with evil intent struck me down and used foul magic to destroy the dig site. I barely escaped with my life.”
A number of culprits came to mind. But the biggest one, or ones, was Marcos, aka the jinn brothers. Marcos knew about the room, which meant the jinn did. The fact that this happened immediately after their Marcos spell broke couldn’t be a coincidence.
“Now I think its best you just take a few days off. Relax, take it easy. Everything will be all worked out soon enough.” He patted my shoulder, but there was a brief flash of something dark in his eyes. Must have been the sun because it was gone an instant later.
“But I really—“
“No, no. Just go home. See to your faery friends.” With a pat that turned into a light shove, he pushed me back toward the trail.
What had just happened? This was the first time a job left me without someone dying or going missing.
I was just out of the jungle when a buzz flew past my ear.
It was the little purple faery and she was carrying a pouch not unlike the one the girls used to store things too big to carry. She dropped it into my hand.
“I get given.You take. Him bad.” She pointed back toward the dig, but when I turned around she vanished.
There was no way I could open the bag, it was faery sized and had faery magic. The girls were gone but I had a sinking suspicion I knew where they were.
The park wasn’t my favorite place and not just because I often felt like I was being stalked by squirrels. It had been allowed to go wild years back, and the trees had taken their task to heart. Many of the trees had old magic, it was weak but still there. Going inside the park made me feel a bit like whisky did. Wild and out of control.
But I needed to know what was in the bag, and so I needed the girls.
The pressure in my head started building as soon as I stepped inside. In some ways it felt amazing. I felt like I could do anything. However, it also gave me the feeling that ripping off all of my clothes and climbing up in a tree to spend the rest of my days might be a good idea. Luckily the girls found me before anything happened.
“You no come here. Bad. Boom not now. No come here.” Garbage had taken her role as leader seriously and had added a small ring as a crown to her flower petal cap. The other two flew in formation behind her.
“I don’t have time for your stories, Garbage. I need you to get something out of this.” All three pairs of faery eyes grew huge when I waggled the black fabric in front of them.
All three flew forward at once, but Garbage held up her war blade, and the others stopped.
“This important. I take.” She shifted her blade to her other hand and reached out for the bag.
“No.” I jerked it just out of her reach. “The purple faery gave it to me. I need you to promise you’ll give me whatever is in there.” I didn’t like the looks on those tiny stubborn faces so I added a threat. “Or I’ll report it to Queen Mungoosey. She told me you would help me.” So that was stretching things, but it was close enough to the truth.
Garbage’s lower lip stuck out so far it looked like she was sucking half an orange. “Fine. Promise.” Once the other two nodded their agreement, I held the bag up again.
Even though I knew those bags could hold just about anything, I was really not expecting what came out.
The missing scroll. The one the torn pieces had come from. And another page that wasn’t in some undecipherable language. Well, I couldn’t read it, but I knew someone who could. The scratching was clearly chataling.
It was the last item that got me swearing however.
It was a clipping from a newspaper from three years ago. The Mount Traffia Tattler, a town fifty miles due south of Beccia, was saddened to announce the death of a beloved archeologist. One Dr. Even Thaddeus. Just in case the name wasn’t enough, the photo was an exact duplicate of the man I’d left not an hour ago.
Garbage looked forlornly into the bag, then shook it upside down. The look on her face indicated sorrow that there had been nothing of worth inside. Her sadness lasted an entire three minutes, just long enough for me to re-read the newspaper article.
“Here. You keep. We need to see about things.” In an odd fit of compassion, she patted me on the head, then all three flew deeper into the forest-like park.
I waved them on then carefully folded the papers and scroll into an inner pocket of my jacket. I needed to see Thaddeus. Or rather the thing acting his part.
The smart voice in my head said getting reinforcements would be the best approach. Whoever the dwarf was that I had been working for the last couple of days wasn’t Thaddeus, and it was most likely someone extremely dangerous.
The pissed-off side of my mind was sick of being the Universe’s whipping girl and wanted answers.
That side won and I was jogging through the outskirts of Beccia before the rational side could come up with a rebuttal.
I’d been gone from the ruins just under two hours, but it might have been days. All of the nosy diggers had been chased off, and a fence not unlike the one blocking the entire ruins a few days ago was around our former dig site.
Thaddeus, or whoever he was, was nowhere to be found.
I slowed down and approached the area with caution, but no guards came to greet me.
The fence looked like the previous one, but there was no spell casting on it. The filaments in the middle of the metal wire of the fence were dull and bland, not brightly waving like they would be if a spell was active.
Throwing more caution into the vortex, I jumped up and scrambled over the fence. I had been attacked, accused of murder, accosted repeatedly, and now I was getting some answers.
After fifteen minutes of some serious stomping around the dig area I was still looking for those answers.
There were no clues of any sort left. The destruction of the dig site had been thorough. And obviously deliberate. Although I now suspected my former patron had been the one who brought it down. What could he have been covering up?
I kicked a rock lying where the entrance had been. But the rock didn’t move.
I bent lower and realized it wasn’t a rock but a battered and cold brown foot.
I wasn’t certain, but I had a bad feeling that there was at least one jinn in that pile of rocks.
The thought of what I had previously been doing with said jinns, grante
d in an altered form, made me almost throw up.
I managed not to, but I moved away from the ruins. I’d have to tell someone, but I’d have to do it anonymously. Even though I knew that Zirtha had been the one who murdered Nirtha, I didn’t think the guards would believe me. Having one, possibly three more bodies show up suspiciously dead around me might not be looked at favorably.
I quickly climbed the fence, then took a less traveled route out of the ruins. I’m not sure who saw me coming in, I was too mad to notice at the time. But I was careful that no one saw me going out.
Once I had gotten clear of the dig, I made my way to the Shimmering Dewdrop as quickly as possible. I needed to talk to Harlan, and my only hope was that he’d broken off for lunch early and had gone into the pub.
Unfortunately there was no one but Foxy, the tiny gnome brigade of daytime bar sitters, and the large daytime barmaid, Piltian, awaiting me. I toyed about trying to sneak back into the dig and looking for Harlan myself, but I had no idea where Thaddeus was. I did know that my irrational search for him aside, I really didn’t want him to find me.
With a nod at Foxy, I ducked back out of the pub and went looking for some help.
It took me almost a half hour to find an urchin willing to run my note into the dig for Harlan. And the greedy monster took most all of my coin to do it to.
The note was simple. Danger. And I needed him at my house. Hopefully he’d take it seriously.
Chapter 33
I’d paced my living room exactly seventeen times when a knock rattled my door. Thinking it was Harlan, I almost opened it without thinking.
Luckily, thanks to all of the mayhem in my life, I’d become extremely paranoid.
I looked out my peek hole only to find two representatives of Beccia’s finest. Good for me, they’d both been looking down the hall and not at the door. I pulled away from the peek hole silently and waited.
Another door rattling knock echoed around my home. Then the welcome sound of boots striding off.
With a sigh I forced myself to sit down. Had they found the jinns already?
Another knock almost sent me flying into the rafters, but a quick peek told me this one was Harlan.
“Get in quickly.” I tugged him in with as much force as I could, then looked outside for any watchers, and shut the door.
“Whatever is wrong? I’ll have you know, I was in the middle of digging out what could be more elven flanges…”
“This, Harlan. This is what’s wrong.” I waved the newspaper cutting in front of his face. “And the fact that someone destroyed the dig this person and I were working on, most likely him. Plus he may or may not have killed the jinn brothers, and Marcos, well, they are the same actually, and plus the guards are looking for me.”
Harlan had started to read the article but stopped when my babbling reached apparently hysterical levels. He didn’t slap me, but he did lick the side of my face and tucked me back into my chair.
“Better?” He watched me from over the article as he skimmed it.
“You licked me!”
“It is what one does with hysterical kittens. I believe it got through to you, yes?”
Concern darkened his eyes. “This was your patron?”
Realizing that my earlier tirade had probably made no sense at all, I slowed down and filled him in. Explaining about Marcos, the jinns, and the scrolls took the longest.
“So the jinns were your lover—”
“Almost. Almost lover. We had one date. Nothing more.”
“And this scroll may have prophesy of the fate of the world?”
“Yes. All of it yes.” I looked at his hands. He had the scroll and the newspaper…I’d forgotten to give him the chataling document. “Oh and this, this was really why I called you.”
“Of course, because what you’ve told me isn’t enough to…” His voice faded and his eyes grew huge as he grabbed the third paper from me. “Where did this come from?” He was clearly reading the document, but it must have been an odd dialect because he was moving his lips.
He also kept glancing at the damaged scroll.
“Where did this come from, Taryn?”
If the extreme calmness in his voice didn’t terrify me, the look in his eyes would have. In all the years I’ve known Harlan, I’ve seen a lot of emotions on that broad furry face.
But I’d never seen terror.
“The purple faery gave it to me, same as the others.” Part of me didn’t want to know, but I knew I was past having a choice. “What does it say?”
Harlan’s hand was shaking as he handed the document back to me. “If what the scribe who wrote that said is true, the scrolls are a key to end time. A storm of destruction that will move all non-believers out of time, the wielder will control everything to his whim. There are three scrolls and all must be read in order by one who knows the tongue. The scribe knew enough to translate what it did, but he also added notes that indicate he had gone mad. From trying to translate the scrolls.”
“Does it say anything about a gargoyle made of glass?” I didn’t want to ask, but I had to keep doing it. I might or might not believe in things like prophesies, but clearly someone did. Someone who didn’t mind how many bodies got racked up in the process to make one happen.
Harlan gave me all of the papers back and wiped his hands off on his vest. “Yes. A gargoyle made of the light of night will activate the key to let forth the storm. And a sacrifice, one who will be found to be pure…something. The rest of the line just rambles off. There were also a lot of clues that would lead to the prophecy but they were gibberish.” He shook his head and started licking his paw mindlessly. “This is real, Taryn. I have enough magic to feel it. That thing is real. We have to find this glass gargoyle and destroy it.”
“I know where it is.” A horrific feeling began to grow in my gut. Was Alric the creature behind all of this? I knew he was obsessed with the gargoyle, and had pretty much figured he was the mysterious man in black who’d questioned me about it a few days ago. I had a bad feeling it may have been the reason he was in Beccia in the first place. And there was no question he was dangerous. But part of me had really been hoping he wasn’t one of the growing list of bad guys.
“And? Taryn, we don’t have time. Where is it?” Harlan had stopped his comfort licking and was heading for the door.
“I gave it to Alric.”
The look on Harlan’s face was akin to a pet cat with a really bad hair ball.
“You did what?”
“I didn’t know for sure what it was. We knew it was in a prophesy, but didn’t know in what regard. There was no way I could have protected it.” I didn’t add that had I tried to keep it, I couldn’t have stopped Alric from taking it.
“Come on.” Harlan grabbed my arm and pulled me toward my door.
“Where are we going?” I struggled to keep to my feet at the same time I stuffed the papers back into my inner pocket.
“We need Covey.”
***
That was about the last thing he said until we reached Covey’s home. Harlan was clearly thinking through some important, the-world-might-be-ending things in his feline head and I certainly didn’t want to hinder him.
However I should have been paying more attention to where he was going. I smashed my face into his back when he slammed to a halt.
“Dang it, Harlan that hurt my no…” The rest of my complaint died at what had brought him to a halt.
Covey’s house had been ransacked. Actually, it looked like the entire inside had been taken out, flipped, and tossed on the front lawn.
“Covey!” I ran forward without even thinking. Too many people were ending up dead around me and I couldn’t stand it if this trend extended to my friends.
Harlan grabbed me. “They may still be in there.”
I pried his hand off and shook my head. “We’re here now, we need to help her.” I led the way inside shaking my head at the damage. What few things hadn’t been taken outside had been th
oroughly taken apart. I walked over to Covey’s secret hidey lock box. Or rather what was left of it. It was nothing more than a pile of metal splinters.
“The scrolls.”
Harlan closed his eyes when he saw the container. “She had the other two.”
“We still have the third one though.” I stepped over the metal remains of the lock box, and my gut twisted. A thin trail of light green blood marked the kitchen floor.
Chapter 34
“I think he took Covey.” I grabbed Harlan’s vest as the truth of it hit me. “Alric attacked and kidnapped Covey.”
“Easy there, child.” Harlan carefully pried my fingers off his clothing. “We don’t know for sure it was that man, nor do we know Covey was taken. One of the hooligans may have been of the same blood type. We need to check the university.” He paused and squinted out of a window. “Oh dear. Did you say the constables were looking for you?”
I swore. They were following me on my trail of death and destruction. Not all of which I caused but all of which I seemed to be involved in. “Quick, we can sneak out the back. We have to get to the university and see if Covey is there.”
I snuck a look out the window, and sure enough it was the same two officers who had been at my door. I didn’t think they were going to lock me back up for Nirtha’s murder, but I couldn’t take that chance. And I sure as hell didn’t want to answer any questions about bodies that were in the ruins.
I took side streets and back roads to get to the university, even going so far as to cross the campus the long way. I wasn’t sure how things were all pulling together, but so far I wasn’t liking it. I’d even gone so far as to flag down another messenger kid and scribbled a note for the faeries. If I wasn’t home in an hour, they needed to get help and find me. Harlan said it was over the top, but he ponied up the coins to pay for it fast enough.
We’d just started down the corridor leading to Covey’s office when the guards caught us.
“Taryn St. Giles?” The man’s voice could have identified me to people back at the dig site.
The Glass Gargoyle (The Lost Ancients Book 1) Page 26