The Diamond Sphinx (The Lost Ancients Book 6)

by Marie Andreas

  “Home!” Crusty yelled, and then flew for the door. It was ajar a good five inches. And she still managed to smack into the door itself. “Whoops!” She laughed maniacally, peeled herself off the door, and flew in.

  I let everyone go before me, even the constructs. This house wasn’t much, but it represented my old life. The one I really wanted back. Seeing it was hard; going into it, and knowing I couldn’t come back yet, was going to be even worse.

  Life was easier when all I cared about was my digger work and the pub.

  The inside wasn’t as bad as I feared. The spells I’d put on it when we left had held until this airborne attack. That could have been why the back wall of the kitchen blew off. The spells had been centered there. Good to know I’d gotten my money’s worth.

  The house itself was, surprisingly, in good shape. The furniture was intact, if a bit more clustered to one side than it had been. A few knick-knacks were tumbled about. All in all, everything was good.

  Even my bedroom was unmolested, just tossed about. I bent to pick up two small elven statues, mementos of my first find when I’d begun as a digger and my patron had felt generous. They were lying on the floor near my bed, along with a third item that had rolled underneath.

  My hand tingled as it closed in on the small glass object under my bed. I pulled my hand and the bauble back fast in case it was a bomb. It wasn’t a bomb, but I still screamed.

  It was the glass gargoyle.

  Alric came running in and started swearing as much as I was in my head. I really wanted to fling it across the room, but I knew that wasn’t a good idea.

  Bunky and Irving came flying in at the noise and Irving came right up to the glass gargoyle in my hand and nudged it. Siabiane had made him to look like the glass gargoyle relic. He turned to Bunky and the faeries and made a gronking sound.

  “He say not same,” Leaf translated.

  Alric held out his hand and I gave it to him. The flare from his geas was visible under the sleeve of his black shirt.

  “That can’t be good,” I said. “Neither your geas lighting up nor the fact that the gargoyle back, but according to Irving, it’s not the same.”

  Alric switched the hand holding the small glass gargoyle and the flare from his right arm died down, but I could see a tiny bit of light peeking out from his sleeve. “The second one came into being when I took the first one into the other dimension and destroyed it. If this is not that one, then something must have destroyed the second one and this is a third incarnation.” He peered at it closely, but not so close that Irving couldn’t hover over it. It was difficult to tell with metal constructs, but Irving did not seem happy.

  “So, maybe Nivinal has been destroyed? He had that thing. But why did it come back here? How is it coming back? And if they can all come back—how are we going to destroy them?” He and I walked out to my living room and sat. I almost felt like I should be offering tea to Alric.

  “I don’t think we can count on him being out of the picture until we see his dead body, but he could have come under attack and the gargoyle was destroyed in the fight. As for why it keeps coming back to you, I don’t know.” He held up his hand. “Yes, you weren’t here, but this place is imbued with your essence. You weren’t living here when the second one came to you, it found you in your old apartment. As for destroying the weapon? The relics are each different. The rest we should be able to destroy, once we find a way. The gargoyle’s domain is time and space. It’s just reinventing itself each time it is destroyed.”

  I really didn’t like his emphasis on ‘should be’. According to the brains of our operation, if we could get the pieces together, we could destroy them.

  “The question is how did whoever attacked Beccia, specifically your house, know it was here?” The glow from his sleeve was gone, but I noticed that he wasn’t touching the relic with that hand.

  “And what are we going to do with it?” The words were barely out of my mouth when Irving gronked, dove for us, and swallowed the gargoyle relic.

  He’d struck with enough force to knock Alric back, but it was because he was focusing on eating the relic rather than trying not to hurt anyone. He flew as high as he could in the house and gronked a few more times.

  “He say sorry,” Leaf translated again.

  “Irving, you can’t keep eating the relics. Eventually something bad will happen.” I wasn’t sure what. Somehow he’d not suffered any side effects from the basilisk, and that was the most overtly dangerous of the bunch. Each of the relics controlled a different aspect of the weapon used against the Ancients. The gargoyle was time and space. The chimera was an augmenter; it reinforced the others and made them stronger. The dragon was greed, although Lorcan said it wasn’t really greed but an urge to possess. It called people to it. The manticore was protection. The basilisk was aggression.

  “Just what does the sphinx do?” Irving was showing no sign of dropping lower, so maybe if we ignored him for a bit he might relax enough to come closer. Not that we could do much. Once he’d done whatever he did to the basilisk, I hadn’t been able to even see the thing in his mouth anymore. I needed to find Siabiane and find out just what she’d built into Irving. He wasn’t that much larger than the relics he kept swallowing.

  Alric had been watching Irving as well, but shook his head and turned back to me. “Padraig and Lorcan aren’t sure, and they’ve been able to figure out a lot more of these scrolls than I have. Padraig doesn’t think there’s a pattern to the order that they’ve been found, but Lorcan does. He believes these things are following a pattern of their own. Which would make the sphinx an anchor of some sort for the others.”

  “Is right. Come back,” Garbage dropped down to hover in front of us. “But no boom this time.” She shivered and rubbed her tiny arms. I tended to forget that the faeries insisted they had been around since the time of the Ancients. If they were to be believed, they had been companions of the Ancients, and been at a huge loss when the Ancients vanished. As much as they liked booms, the ending of their companions was one boom they didn’t want to return.

  “Could the relics be reappearing to fix what happened?” The thought sounded stupid to me. The faeries each had the same look—something bad happened, it was going to happen again, but we might be able to change the result. Of course trying to get them to say that wasn’t going to happen. I just had a feeling. The kind you get when someone walks over your grave.

  “It’s hard to say. There are many prophecies, both before and after the vanishing of the Ancients. I don’t believe in them myself, but there are those who do.”

  Irving was showing no sign of coming near us; most likely the gargoyle relic was in his mouth and hadn’t had a chance to go wherever the basilisk went. “Could we just feed them to Irving? The relics, I mean. He’s locked away that basilisk inside him somewhere. If he does the same thing with the gargoyle, that’s two that no one can touch.”

  Alric studied Irving, then shook his head. “We’re not sure where they go in there, and if they exist on some level in this plane, they can be used. Nivinal has been waiting a very long time to get this weapon together—he won’t let a construct stop him. It’s not optimal that they are in Irving, but for now I say leave them there and tell no one outside of our group.” He nodded to Bunky and the girls. “And you have to protect him at all costs. But he can’t eat any other relics.”

  Irving gronked again.

  “He say still sorry.” Leaf was really getting into her translator role.

  “We watch.” Garbage was back into general mode. Crusty wasn’t paying attention but was spinning in a circle, humming to herself.

  Finally she stopped. “Need drink!” Just like that the three faeries tore out the door with Irving following. Bunky bobbed to Alric and me, gronked, and followed.

  “He said he’ll guard them.” Alric got off my sofa and we went for the door. He could understand Bunky; it seemed a number of people could, but I couldn’t. Judging from Leaf’s need to transl
ate, no one but the faeries and Bunky could understand Irving. Probably Siabiane could as well since she created him.

  I looked at my battered house as we stood outside of it. A tiny part of me knew I might not ever be coming back. I squished that thought into a ball. “Can we protect it? Even with the holes?”

  Alric had already been looking beyond the houses to the hedge, but stepped back and rubbed my shoulder. “I can repair the back wall so it is sound. The spell will be triggered to you alone, but the house will appear intact if anyone even notices it. For the most part it will just not be apparent to most people that there is anything there.” He waved his hand and a soft glow settled over my house. I knew it was there, but it was already not there as well.

  I kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

  “You will come back some day, I feel it.” He squeezed my hand.

  It wasn’t until we were almost to the hedge that I realized he said me and not us.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I wanted to ask him what he’d meant, but things were still delicate between us. I’d wait until things settled down.

  The hedge where he stood looked burnt, but it was already healing itself. If we had arrived fifteen minutes later, all signs of the explosion would have been gone. Amara was going to have to watch how much power she gave the giant plant wall, and what she used. Dryads weren’t common in this part of the kingdom, but there would be talk of this hedge. Scholars who knew what a normal dryad could or couldn’t do would realize something was different about her.

  If she wanted to be outed as a goddess, that would be one thing. But she had been hiding for over two thousand years and didn’t want Foxy to know what she was. She was going to have to lay low after this if she wanted to keep her secrets.

  “They almost made it through the hedge,” Alric said as he touched the leaves. “I know how strong this was even before she reinforced it; it would have taken a serious magic user to have gotten this far.”

  “Nivinal?” I looked around for a place to get sick as my gut heaved just mentioning his name. He knew what I’d become when I’d changed during the fight against him, or at least had been expecting it. He was also responsible for hundreds of deaths. That was just in the current time. Who knew what he’d done during the Breaking as the leader of the Dark.

  Alric placed both hands on the hedge and closed his eyes. Finally he pulled back. “I don’t think so. We had enough exposure to his magic to know what it feels like, and this isn’t it.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. That it wasn’t he or that there was someone else out there with that kind of power who was also attacking us.

  We poked around the hedge area a bit more. Well, Alric did. I mostly watched. I’d missed him when I’d taken off. I believed it was for the best, and I was willing to avoid him and the others as long as necessary, but I’d missed him. Things were still strained between us, kisses or no. I knew that final battle against Nivinal had taken a lot of out him. We’d been losing the fight before I turned into whatever it was I’d become. Hopefully we could get back to where we were.

  “What was that sigh for?”

  I’d drifted off in my thoughts and hadn’t noticed that Alric had stopped investigating the hedge and was right in front of me. I hadn’t realized that I’d sighed out loud either. “I missed you.” I briefly thought about playing off the sigh, but it wasn’t worth it. I agreed with what I’d done, but I also missed him.

  He gave me a quick kiss, and then rubbed my arms. “You really have no idea what you became? We do need to figure out how Nivinal cast a spell on you for that transformation—and why.”

  “I have no idea. I was huge; the Spheres only came to my shoulder. I was…scaly…but not like a syclarion. Well, sort of. I think. My hands had claws and although I was on two legs, I really felt like I might like running on all four.” I’d been working hard for the past month to forget all of this, so recalling it now was harder than I’d expected. “And I had a tail.”

  Alric had a non-judgmental expression, but his left eyebrow did quirk up at that. “Wings?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, maybe? I don’t think so, but I really can’t be certain. I didn’t fly, nor notice them if they were there. I noticed the manticore on the ground where I’d fallen, then I just started going after the stone zombies and Nivinal. After the spell he cast had been broken, he’d been stripped from his projected image, and those things he called out of the ground were destroyed, I collapsed. Came to with the manticore back inside me and all of you unconscious.” My voice dropped. “I thought I’d killed you. The thought was only for a second. But it was there.”

  “But you didn’t; you saved us. I don’t know that Nivinal spelled you, but someone did. It could have even been placed on you when we were in the past, or in Null.” He ran his hand through his hair. “There are too many places. But whoever did it, they were good. I can’t feel a trace of it now.”

  “You don’t think it was just me? Something, maybe, I am?” There was my terror in its glory. A spell that strong would be awful. However, in the past month I’d gone through far worse scenarios in my head.

  “I’ve never heard of a dryad-human-syclarion breed combination before. And if you were part syclarion we would have noticed long before now. Someone hit you with a spell.”

  A quick blur of white out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. It was darting in and out of the hedge, but as soon as I focused on it, it stopped. “Did you see anything over there?” I waved where I’d seen the unfortunately familiar small being. I hadn’t mentioned seeing the minkie before. Since no one, including the faeries and the constructs, had seen it, I figured it was in my head. Or maybe a side effect from whatever spell had turned me into a monster. I was ignoring the fact that I’d seen it months before that happened.

  “I didn’t see anything. What did you see?”

  “Nothing. I thought I saw—”

  “What is that?” Alric looked just past me, a bit further down the hedge.

  I turned and there was the damn minkie. He was sitting up in the hedge looking quite smug. If small, mythological beings could look smug, that is.

  “You see it?”

  “The tall white bird? Yeah. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Wait, bird?” I squinted at the minkie. Nope, still a small furry member of some twisted rodent line. “It’s got fur.”

  “Fur? No, feathers. Long, silky feathers.”

  Alric reached out to try and stop me as I took a few steps closer to it, but I dodged around him. “You don’t really look like this do you? Or what he sees?” Someone else at least seeing something was an improvement. But it would be nice if the creature looked the same to both of us. Would help make our story more believable if we told others.

  The minkie nodded and did a shimmy. For a second I saw what Alric must see. About twice as tall as before, a white bird appeared. Long iridescent feathers curled around it. Then it went back to the way I knew it.

  “It just flashed into something small and furry. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?” Alric didn’t sound concerned, which was a plus.

  The minkie looked even smugger, nodded to both of us, then vanished. I turned back to Alric with a sigh. “Yes. I think it might be the minkie the girls sing about. Or at least a minkie. I first saw it before Flarinen and Lorcan found us in the wagons back in the slot canyon. But the girls denied seeing it after I’d seen them with it. I mean really denied. Then those gloughstrikes hit and I had other things to worry about. I saw it a few more times, popping up in odd places. No one else saw it though. He caused the fog after my attack, might have been why none of you recall seeing me, and led me out of there. The faeries and constructs followed me, but I don’t think they saw him then either.”

  Alric walked over to the place in the hedge where we’d seen it. I knew the little troublemaker was gone, but Alric was most likely trying to pick up magic residue. He came back shaking his head.

&nb
sp; “I wish I could tell more, but whatever the thing is, it’s elemental magic. Like the faeries. Essentially, they are magic, they don’t do magic. Makes it almost impossible to tell anything more. The faeries denied seeing it?”

  “Yes, that was when they told you to watch me because I’d hit my head.” We started walking along the hedge but not back toward the pub.

  “Maybe if we get them drunk enough we can at least find out what they think it is. At this point there’s no way to be sure what side anything or anyone is on.” He reached out and took my hand. Things were still weird, but at least we were on the right path. Providing that neither of us took off without warning the other again. I looked over to Alric as he watched the hedge. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t a flight risk.

  “I want to circle this portion at least, see where they attacked the entrance to the aqueducts. Since the explosion near your house was with a purpose beyond simple destruction, I think we have to presume the others might have had other reasons as well.”

  I shrugged. I should have known this wasn’t just a nice walk with the love of my life.

  The hedge near the entrance we’d used to get into the aqueduct looked fine, but I knew the hedge had been healing itself thanks to its power increase from Amara. The woods looked okay too, which was good and bad. Amara’s healing would have been for her hedge only, so if the woods weren’t damaged, then whoever attacked the entrance had serious skill as well as power.

  The entrance to the aqueduct was slightly smoking. It hadn’t been a big entrance to start with, and now little remained. Alric dropped my hand and got down on his knees to pull out some of the rubble. I started to help.

  “Keep an eye out. We know there were at least a few enemies in town last night; they might still be around.” He pulled a final piece out then managed to slide into the hole. He crawled out a lot less gracefully a moment later. “They did the damage from the inside. There’s no way through from this end any more, which isn’t good for them either. That could be how they were getting people in.”