The Emerald Dragon (The Lost Ancients Book 3) (12 page)

Chapter Twenty

It was more than a little disturbing having what looked, sounded, and felt like Alric squirming to get off me.

I got both my legs under him and kicked up as hard as I could. It worked, sort of. I got him free of me, unfortunately the changeling landed right on Covey.

The good thing was, the impact was enough to wake her up, and she came up fighting. The writhing changeling was tied up with an abandoned clothesline in no time.

We’d tried one route of questioning earlier, now for another tactic. We’d left this one’s spell ball in Alric’s secret cottage, but now I wished we had it for negotiation.

“Tell me who hired you.”

The changeling tried looking away but Covey held him still.

“You know what? I don’t like you not answering. I also don’t like you wearing Alric’s form. So change out of it now, or I destroy your spell bubble. Yes, we still have it, and I can destroy it as easily as I brought you to me.” Total lie, but hanging around Alric had a benefit—I was getting better at lying.

The changeling panicked something I decided did not work well with Alric’s features. It slowly nodded and changed into one of the small shimmery gray forms I’d seen in Covey’s house. I was glad Orenda wasn’t around. She seemed like a screamer, and we didn’t need folks coming back here.

“Quickly tell me who hired you.” I kneeled down to get closer to him. “Or I will crush your escape ball.” I held my hand in the air as if holding an invisible ball.

Covey didn’t say anything, but the small nod she gave me encouraged me.

“You have less than a minute, then that spell bubble is gone.” Most of my life, I’d sat back and let other folks be the strong and aggressive ones. Between all the changes I’d gone through physically, as well as the fact that I was getting tired of these people messing around with my life, I was no longer waiting for others.

The changeling looked at me, then at my hand. Distress was clear on his face, but what was also clear was a set to his jaw.

“What do you think, Covey? Can I destroy it in one spell?” This might be better than actually having it; I wouldn’t have wanted to destroy the spell ball. Not yet anyway.

Bunky gave a warbling cry as he came through a gap in the fence and flew toward us. He wasn’t doing goat impersonations this time, but had clearly been hanging out with some of the songbirds deep in the ruins.

The changeling almost jumped out of his skin. Actually he did jump out, if you call flashing through a dozen different faces, most of them elven but a few distinctively not in about thirty seconds, jumping out of your skin.

“Keep the construct away.” The changeling tried to scramble away from Bunky, who was still buzzing around overhead, completely unaware of the effect he was having on the changeling. “I tell you what I know. I will!”

Good to know, elves feared faeries, and changelings feared constructs.

Covey was practically sitting on the changeling to keep him from slithering away, but she seemed as interested in his answer as I was. Predators. Always looking for weaknesses.

“Unclean. Unclean.” The changeling was frothing at the mouth now and contorting himself to stay as far from Bunky as he could. He really didn’t like constructs.

“Now, who hired you and why?” I waved Bunky a little bit closer. The changeling started to shake in time with Bunky’s buzzing.

“I can’t…ai! Keep it away from me!”

Bunky was a quick study and had caught on to the game of scare the changeling. He flew forward with a dangerous sounding buzz and hovered right over my shoulder.

“They wore masks. Small.”

I tilted my head toward Covey to see if that sounded like anything to her. She shrugged.

“They wore small masks? What did they look like? Where did you meet them?” I had a feeling we weren’t going to get a wealth of information out of this thing, but I had to try.

“No. Small men. In masks. Hire us. For someone else. Don’t know who else.”

Covey’s brow went up at that one. We were beginning to see more and more evidence of a bunch of small men. Whether they were the rakasa, the brownies, or something else still remained to be seen. Nevertheless, anything that popped up more than twice wasn’t a coincidence.

“So it wasn’t the elves? I thought your people lived with the elves?” I hadn’t even known of changelings until recently, but Covey and Harlan said they lived with the elves.

The changeling started twitching and hacking. I stood back in case this was some self-destruct thing.

Then I realized it was laughing. Not a happy laugh.

“Elves. We don’t live with them.” The changeling spit off to the side in case his tone hadn’t been clear. “They left us behind. We are free now.”

So it wasn’t Glorinal. The changelings may have pretended to be an elf, but it was clear none of them would have taken a job directly from one. Of course, a strong magic user could glamour himself not to look like an elf. However, I’d wager the changelings would be able to tell—them being master change artists themselves.

“What else can you tell us?” Bunky had stayed in position over my left shoulder, but I waved him forward. He got within a foot of the changeling and hovered menacingly.

“We are wanderers. We get work where we can. This time a group of small men in masks hired us. They brought us here. We saw elf to copy, we copy. They tell us to make sure elf being seen all over.” He winced, then continued. “Elf being taken north and we needed him to be seen here. My brother was sent to gather information from you, I had other tasks.”

“What was your specific task?” Covey got up and paced around then she spun toward him, making sure she looked as predatory as possible.

“No.” The changeling settled into himself and clammed up.

I nodded for Bunky to pull back a bit. Maybe we could play good digger, bad construct and get some real answers. “What did they ask you to do? And where did you see the elf you were copying?” That might help track down Alric.

“I was told to run around doing things and make sure people see me with the bag.” The changeling shrugged. “Stupid idea, bag just rags. We were given his imprint to copy, but we saw the elf in the ruins; he had a cave that got destroyed. He was supposed to go with it. That didn’t happen, so guess he got taken.”

He started shaking, but from the look on his face, he wasn’t doing it. Covey tried to grab him, but his eyes went wide and a second later, he vanished.

Bunky buzzed around the area that the changeling had been in, but all he found was the laundry line Covey had used to tie him up. It was sliced through in two places as if a sharp blade had cut it. One that cauterized the ends.

Covey and I looked around as well, but saw nothing. We were in an alley of sorts, but the other end of it was nothing more than a narrow walkway between two houses whose owners had obviously been building out over the years. No one could have come through there without us noticing.

I was keeping an eye on Bunky, in case his little construct eyes could see something we couldn’t. He kept circling around a spot of stubby grass about a foot behind where we’d kept the changeling. I moved closer. The ground was an odd color, as if it came from somewhere else and didn’t match.

I looked around, grabbed a stone and threw it at the grass. I’d like to say I was surprised when the stone passed right through the grass with a slight flicker, but the fact was, Beccia was getting weirder. It was taking more to surprise me these days.

Bunky dove forward and before I could pull him back, he’d vanished into the hole. I ran forward to stick my head in, Covey right behind me, but Bunky flew straight up out of the hole.

He’d almost smacked me in the head so I rocked back on my heels. He kept buzzing around the hole as if he was sniffing, but then as soon as he thought Covey or I would come closer, he buzzed us off. After a minute or two, the image of the stubby grass vanished and the ground bubbled up like water.

Not unlike the way the holes from the chimeras and sceanra anam filled in after they burst out. However, this wasn’t a burst out so much as something had come out, grabbed the changeling, and dropped back in before we could see him. Then got away before the tunnel filled in.

The changeling had looked surprised, so that told me it wasn’t expecting that sort of rescue, but since it didn’t even know who or what hired it, that wasn’t helpful. It was probably whoever was behind hiring the changelings and they didn’t want us finding out the truth. Whatever that was.

“That was interesting.” Covey was studying the area. “I’ve never seen a hole fill back in before.”

“I have.” I told her about the chimeras. Bunky did his nodding bobbing behind me. He’d been long gone by the time the holes that birthed him and the others closed, but he was obviously familiar with it.

“We’re still not getting any closer to finding out what happened to Alric.” I wasn’t as worried, now that it looked like someone else had taken him and not Glorinal. That was a sad statement, but he had messed with my emotions enough over the last few months, and I figured he could get out of most things. I was still worried, just not full panic worried.

“Nor where the beings who took Glorinal out of the cave vanished to. We have to assume that they have Glorinal and they have the obsidian chimera.” Covey only growled a little when she said his name, so that was an improvement of sorts.

I didn’t add that we also had no idea where she’d vanished to yesterday, and why she had insisted we were under attack from mythological beings, but then recalled none of it. I’d have to ask her later if the sahlins of her past were small men.

“True. I think we have to consider that whoever is behind this is probably behind the ground shaking.” I hated to keep saying explosions.

“I agree.” She scowled. “There were no indications that the rakasa were underground dwellers in the past, but they were never a focus of my study. I think our best course is to track down the most recent underground disturbance. We know they went under to get
him
out, and they went under to try to kill Alric. It can also be assumed that they went under to get their changeling back.”

“Where is he?” The voice was loud, demanding, and far closer than it should have been.

Covey and I turned around and found that while we had been discussing going in search of the latest explosion, a walking explosion had snuck up on us.

Or rather a posse of entitled rich snobs snuck up on us. Specifically, the Hill Committee. Five of the richest and most annoying folks you’d never want to meet and they were all looking right at Covey and I.

“I said, Professor, where is that elf? He explained to us late last night that he needed funds to launch a full-scale excavation of the Antiquities Museum. He took our gold fast enough but failed to meet us at the site this morning as planned.” The tall, overdressed woman seemed to be ignoring me. In fact, they were all fixated on Covey as the focus of their annoyance. “He mentioned that you would be supervising.”

Covey’s eyes narrowed and she looked at each one as if they were her students coming in late to class. She then turned to me. “You should continue with that urgent project we discussed. I shall address this situation.” She focused all of her professorial annoyance back on the five in front of her and I made a run for the ruins.

Last night may have been the first job of one of the changelings. Granted, Alric was a thief, former or not, and he stayed in practice. Nevertheless, stealing gold out in the open like that wasn’t his style.

I picked up speed as the voices behind me increased in volume. Bunky took off with me, but made a small chirp, then buzzed off a different direction. Most likely he had gone off to find the girls. It might be time for the first cat race of the day.

I briefly looked back down the street. There may only be one Covey and five of them, but The Hill folks were grossly outmatched. I was confident in Covey getting far more information out of them than they got out of her.

Which left me walking quickly back toward the ruins. I didn’t want to walk past the watcher bird and guard, so I snuck around the side Covey and I had come back down.

This side area was far darker and creepier than the rest of the ruins. It hadn’t been that noticeable when Covey and I were chasing the changeling and finding Alric’s secret magic elf house. But it was palpable now.

I found myself looking up to see if any trees were askew thanks to the explosion, but the further I went in, the darker, heavier, and less likely to be moved by something as trivial as an underground explosion they got. Some of these monsters looked like they would swallow the explosion and spit back ash.

Looking up as I was, it wasn’t too unexpected when I tripped over a smaller root, and crashed to the ground.

Chapter Twenty-One

I fell right in front of a nasty long gash in the ground. It went as far as I could see in either direction. Granted, that wasn’t very far in this thick part of the jungle, but I could see enough to freak me out. It wasn’t more than two feet wide, but the crack looked like it stayed that wide the entire distance I could see.

Had I not tripped on the root, I likely could have found myself lost down a narrow pit. I shivered and scooted back. I was right about the trees though. None of them seemed in the slightest bit disturbed by the crack running through the forest. And it managed to avoid hitting any of them. I’d have to be nice to all the trees out here. If they could manage to deter an act of nature, I had a new respect for what they could do to us mere mortals.

I couldn’t see anything in the crack, and it wasn’t useful—like, say, a trail to free a raving murdering lunatic out of a collapsed mine would be. Which meant this was a radiating crack side effect of whatever had caused the explosion.

It could be a natural earthquake, but those odds were slim, and getting even more so with each explosion we had.

The split seemed to point like an arrow further into the old ruins. Of course, the other end pointed toward the city and a lovely pub that I’m sure missed me terribly. I didn’t think about it for more than a moment. There had been a time I would have run toward The Shimmering Dewdrop. Hell, I wouldn’t have been out here in the first place. But like it or not, it seemed that something big was coming our way. And my friends and I had somehow landed right in the middle of it. Actually, I knew how. Alric. Life was so normal before him. Another thing to have him answer for—again—once we rescued him.

The crack maintained the same width as I walked alongside it. The trees for the most part stayed clear of it. I swore the crack zigged to avoid a monster gapen tree.

It took a few minutes to start seeing the old ruins. The trees had created their perpetual twilight even though it was still early in the day. Unlike the ruins that were under exploration through the Antiquities Museum, these were older and deeper. Towers only stuck up a few feet in the air for the most part, and I found myself again wishing for a patron who would buck tradition enough to dig out here. Qianru was quirky enough to do it, but she was still following her own agenda that she wasn’t sharing with me.

The trees, excessive rocks, and bad condition of the visible ruins were the reasons for no digging. However, what I could see strongly implied stylistic differences between these and the ones in the main ruin area. That might be an angle; the academic side focused on what was found in the regular part of the ruins. However, if I could convince them to believe there were cultural differences between the two sets of ruins, or even just a rumor of them, they might be the force needed to get this section open.

I’d have to work on Covey when the rest of this mess settled down. If anyone was stubborn enough to push the academics into demanding exploration of the old ruins, it would be her. Then we could work on nudging Qianru that direction too.

The crack I was following stopped at a boulder to the left of me. The crack actually had gone under the rock, and part of the rock had fallen in. However, the crack was far wider now.

Behind the massive boulder was what had to be the source of the explosion.

The crack funneled into a large pit, and if I had had even the slightest thought that the most recent shake was an actual earthquake, this destroyed it. The ground had vanished in a large, almost circular, pit, with only the largest of boulders staying stuck in the ground, but bearing wounds to mark the force of the explosion. It had been concentrated and focused, that and the distance out from town, was most likely why no one in town seemed to notice it.

The edge near me had some paper shreds. I picked up a few for Covey and Harlan, but they looked like the ones found at the mine and the museum, a combination of explosives and pre-packaged spell wrappers. The spells were what was controlling the explosions most likely and meant the people behind this probably weren’t strong magic users themselves. I didn’t have the training to control something like an explosion, but someone like Alric would have found it an easy task.

I peered down into the pit, but aside from scarred boulders and tree roots I couldn’t see much. I shouldn’t have let Bunky take off. He would be very helpful right now. I didn’t have a rope, and Alric hadn’t taught me his make a rope out of leaves trick yet.

Even though I had no way of reaching Bunky, I might have a way of getting the girls. I had no idea how close they had to be for our little mind-calling trick to work. I was at least a few miles out of town, and if they’d moved their cat-racing track where I thought, then they were at the opposite end.

I tried calling for them in my head, gave it a few minutes, then sat down when they didn’t respond. I cleared my head. Maybe Covey and her meditation practices might be right. I focused on the faeries, ale, chocolate, the hole in front of me, and me.

Ten minutes later, I was about to give it up and go all the way back into town for some rope when I heard the lovely sounds of faeries arguing, and a loud buzzing overlaying it all.

“Is true! This where happened!” Leaf flew up front near Garbage.

“You wrong, that no happen.” Garbage flew faster, but for once, Leaf wasn’t dawdling. The fact that she was managing to not only keep up with Garbage, but was flying ahead enough to try to keep arguing—not to mention the fact she
was
arguing with her—said a lot about Leaf’s normal pace on things.

She was the slow one because she wanted to be.

The two pulled up a bit before they got to me, but Crusty and Bunky ignored them and kept flying forward.

“Yummies?” Crusty looked around for anything that warranted her being called out here, but then shrugged when she didn’t see anything. “No yummies. You right.” She patted Bunky and he buzzed happily.

Crusty wasn’t upset about the fact I’d used nonexistent treats to get them to come out here, and Garbage and Leaf were still arguing over goddess knew what. It was as if they hadn’t expected any treats well before they got here. I knew the faeries and Bunky communicated somehow, but I’d never looked into it.

“Bunky, did you hear me call them?” He did his version of a headshake and Crusty started giggling.

“He no hear like we do from you, but I share with him. He say no treats but we should help.”

Wow. Leaf asserting herself with Garbage, and now Crusty was thinking. My faeries were changing. This could be good. Or very bad.

I looked back at the other two, but they were still flying around various trees, pointing at things only they saw, and arguing. Once Garbage got going it would be a while before she backed down. I was impressed with Leaf keeping up with her though.

“Okay, so just you, Bunky, and me on this.” I nodded to Bunky and wished I had my gloves with me to scratch him. I’d have to start carrying them around. “I need you two to fly down there and tell me what you see.” I was a bit unsure of using Crusty for this, she being the least observant of the three. Hopefully, whatever connection she and Bunky had would work.

Bunky hovered over the pit, slowly tilting from side to side in the air. He buzzed a question and Crusty nodded and turned toward me. “He says bad, little, little men do this. But they gone again.” She frowned as he added to his original message. “He said they be back.”

I wished I could understand Bunky directly. However, I’d have to take my information filtered through a tiny faery brain. “How does he know all of that?”

“He taste it.” Crusty answered as if I’d asked her what the large tree behind me was. Obviously, there was more to it than that, but Crusty wouldn’t be able to explain. I’d also need to nag Covey about more research on constructs.

“We’ll go with that.” I looked up, but the other two faeries had moved even higher in the air, the only real way to tell they were there was by their voices. I turned back to Crusty and Bunky. “Don’t go down real far, but see what you can find.”

Crusty nodded, and jumped on Bunky’s back, and the two of them looped up in the air, and then dove down. I wasn’t sure why she rode him, but in this case, and with her track record of smashing into things, this might be safer.

The sound of Garbage and Leaf continuing their animated debate was the only sound in the forest. I hadn’t noticed the animal and bird sounds until now that they were gone. Now granted, the faeries and even myself could have made the wildlife go to ground, but faeries came through the forest regularly. The wild ones still spent a fair amount of time somewhere out here, so they should be well known to the local animals.

I looked down the pit but Crusty and Bunky were out of sight, and Garbage and Leaf were now above the leaf line.

It could be nerves, now that I was aware of the silence, but I swore the woods started to feel darker and colder too. I moved closer to a glouster bush and convinced myself I was being paranoid when I crawled down under it and settled myself inside.

The shuffling started to my right, just as I started to think about crawling out from my hidey-hole. Now there was a chance that Covey could have finished up with the committee folks and followed me out here, but as far as I knew I had never heard Covey shuffle in her life.

Then the trees to the right started to move.

The ground had broken open and those trees hadn’t budged at all. Nevertheless, something was bending them as if they were saplings. The shuffling sound got louder, and I shrank into the bush covering me and sent a silent prayer to all three of the girls to stay where they were and to stay quiet.

Then I heard the sounds again, just in time for something to break through the trees on that side of the clearing.