The Emerald Dragon (The Lost Ancients Book 3) (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

A rough nudge to my left shoulder got me walking, then a few more nudges turned me around a half a dozen times until I wasn’t even sure which direction we were going. Whoever was working with the man in brown, they weren’t keen on my slow walking. After the maze they walked me through to disorient me, someone big and beefy threw me over his shoulder.

Not hearing anything other than my own breathing was more than a little freaky. However, maybe they were being quiet in hopes I’d think it was a silencing bag. I tested the theory with a scream. That did nothing other than echo around the very sound spelled bag and add to the headache I had from my excessive destruction of the sceanra anam.

I wished it wasn’t so dark in here so I could at least see what the inside looked like. I’d had a knock-off one of these bags back when I was bounty hunting. But it had been taken when one of my collars, one Gorgeous Sammy the cherub, met with an untimely demise after I’d turned him in. I never asked for my bag back.

However, this bag felt like a real one. The quality of the fabric against my face was akin to something up on The Hill.

Since I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t yell, and trussed up as I was over this monster’s shoulder, couldn’t move, I did what I could do. Think. I didn’t have much. The man in brown had said nothing, but hadn’t been trying to hurt me until the other voice came in. He also hadn’t acted as if he would let me go, more like a bored cat who’d found a new toy. But I think if I had stayed in the tree he wouldn’t have come after me. There wasn’t much to be gained from him aside from that he could fight and wasn’t in command of whatever this operation was.

The second voice was probably the one in command. He hadn’t sounded stressed out or worried about me getting away or even hurting his all-in-brown fighter. He seemed more upset at the games the fighter was playing. He’d said they’d take me instead of a female elf that got away. Unless there was a run on female elves racing around in the ruins, he had to mean Orenda. The fact she hadn’t said anything about escaping from someone didn’t bode well for whatever her true reason for being in Beccia was. Nor for whatever sort of trouble she might bring down on Harlan and Covey.

And at least a third one, a bruiser, the one carrying me with little care for how many low-hanging tree branches might smack me.

The brains, the player, and the brawn. There could be more, but the three of them were a nice neat little package. One that had been in those woods for a reason. The man in brown must have waited until I freed the tile piece, but whether that was their goal, or it changed when I left the piece on the ground, I wasn’t sure. If the tiles had value, they could have stayed to try to free more, with the bag on my head I wouldn’t have known. The only way I knew they hadn’t done that was the fact we were moving.

The brute carrying me wasn’t a picture of grace, that I could tell from being an unwilling passenger. Therefore, I wasn’t too surprised when he took a misstep and almost dropped me. He recovered before either of us took a tumble, but the movement sent a knife hilt briefly into my lower side. I hadn’t even noticed that they hadn’t searched me when they tied me up. It had happened so fast that I hadn’t paid attention. Who kidnaps someone and doesn’t search them for weapons?

While he’d managed to keep me from falling, the man carrying me must have hurt his ankle, as a limp was noticeable. It started getting worse, and I took a chance and tried squirming. If I could unbalance him enough, maybe I could at least get the damn bag off long enough to figure out where we were going.

It worked, sort of.

The man carrying me did stumble. We’d been going down a slight incline for a few minutes, but it had gotten steeper and he misjudged his step. The leg he’d hurt earlier happened to be on the same side I was on, so my movements sent him falling. Unfortunately, they also caused him to fling me away from him as he tried to break his fall. Which was good and bad. I wouldn’t want something that big on top of me, but at the same time, he flung me hard.

Right into a rough wall.

I shook my head as pain flared out. At least my shoulder had taken the brunt of it, not my head, but it still had me seeing stars. My hands were tied behind me, so I reached down as low as I could with my mouth and tried to fling up the spell sack. I twisted a bit to help pull the bag off and kept pulling when the sudden assault of sound that slammed into my ears told me I’d broken the seal. I debated about trying to keep pulling to see if I could get it loose enough to shake off, but the bag was too heavy. Another bad side effect of better quality. I think if Gorgeous Sammy had sneezed while I was carrying him in my spell bag, the entire thing would have shredded. Just my luck to have people who had funding grab me.

At least now I could hear them. Which also meant I could yell, but it also meant I needed to be quiet so they didn’t hear me until I had a chance to make the yell worth the risk. I also didn’t want them deciding to search for weapons at this point. My knife wouldn’t help me now, but if I could get my hands free it might.

Yelling was going on, and not directed at me. There was a good chance that the brute carrying me hadn’t accidentally fallen down the steep ramp we’d come down, or at least he seemed to think so. Moreover, the person or persons he was holding responsible took exception to the accusation and were disagreeing loudly. I was surprised they hadn’t started hitting each other yet.

I hadn’t been able to tell with the bag over my head, but the way the voices were echoing we had to be in a large chamber of some sort. I hadn’t a clue which direction we’d gone, for all I knew we could be back in the center of Beccia. Or far away. Thing was, away from Beccia there weren’t any structures that could be as big as this thing sounded. At least nothing I knew of.

I tried to shift around my position some more; I needed to see where I was. But my movements were cut short by a vise-like grip on my arm.

“Where did you want to keep her? And more importantly, why do you want to keep her? Like I said on the way over, the elf girl was a good idea. This one, I don’t get.” I was going to be upset if I’d missed vital information when I’d been under that damn sack. The voice near me was possibly the man in brown. His accent was strange. It took me a moment to realize that like the brownies, he was probably from the far north. Great, what if these people were working with the little monsters? They were all hanging around the same area at pretty close to the same time and it was clear someone other than the brownies had helped put that golem together. Even if it hadn’t stayed together for long. What if they were all together and they were going to hold me accountable for their toy collapsing?

“What, this one doesn’t meet your standards for a girlfriend?” The laugh was rough, and he sounded big, like possibly the guy who had been carrying me. “You had no problem with our elven princess. At least she was good enough to share your bed for a few weeks. She sounded enthusiastic in fact. Every single night. She cried herself to sleep after you took off.”

“My reasons were my own; I had some trash I needed to cut free. As for this one, I like my women pliable—this one is definitely not.” A rough laugh from the one who had been carrying me was cut off with what sounded to be a punch. That meant both were still way too close. Who in the hell was Orenda if she was roaming the woods shacking up with a bunch of kidnappers and thieves? Although, while she hadn’t said anything about being kidnapped, she had been afraid someone was coming for her. Maybe she’d been held against her will. However, someone being an enthusiastic sex partner didn’t make me think of being held against her will. Maybe she’d liked the man in brown, but didn’t want to share with the others.

“We kept this one, because in case you two morons failed to notice, she must have defeated that damn golem. And she chased off the brownies, not that we couldn’t have once the golem was gone.” This voice sounded like the leader. Heavy footsteps on what sounded like gravel or pounded earth came closer. “Not to mention, I’m pretty sure she’s one of the diggers from this town. If we’re going to get rich, we need her type more than brawn. What was on that tile anyway?”

A shuffling of feet again, and this time the voices were a bit further away.

“Nothing, damn thing was blank, see for yourself.” The man in brown tossed something at the leader. “She can’t be that good of a digger if she spent all that time looking for pieces of cracked tile.”

I fought to keep any reaction from showing. I knew something had been on there. It had been weird and creepy, and I hadn’t been able to make out any of the symbols on it. Therefore, the man in brown lied. Something that wasn’t too unusual in kidnappers, I was sure.

“She can hear us.” The man in brown swore and ran to me; I could see his boots under the edge of the bag. I must have given myself away somehow. His hands were coarse as he roughly pulled the bag tighter and fastened the ends. He’d almost closed it when the leader spoke up.

“No, let her hear. Hell, she might as well see too. No reason to keep that bag on her head at this point. Maybe this time
I
get a new girlfriend.”

The man in brown swore to himself, clearly not agreeing with his leader’s choice, but not willing to fight, then ripped the bag off my head and stomped off.

I had been partially correct. I still had no idea where we were, but we weren’t inside any type of building in Beccia or out of it. Or rather, we weren’t in any building above ground.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I was leaning up against a short broken wall, from what I could see it was clearly elven in origin, in a cavern with a very high ceiling. The cavern looked to have been occupied for quite a while and had mage glows set all around it to make it homey. Or maybe it was so they could see their weapons. Pushed against the cavern walls were piles of weapons, some in use, still others simply relics.

The man in brown was stalking away from me and toward yet another cavern which looked even larger and had at least twenty people in it, most were cleaning weapons or relics. Behind them were a collection of gypsy wagons, most likely the bedrooms for the men and women working down here. Even from this distance, I could tell the wagons looked shabby and ill-used. Probably only a few of them could even still be drawn by a horse.

Looking around I couldn’t see someone like Orenda staying here of her own accord without a reason. That pissy man in brown must be one hell of a lover.

“Not sure what all you’ve heard, but I’ll give you the rundown. I’m Locksead. My gang and I are looking for some relics, and not just any relics, we want the serious ones. The ones like they had….” He stopped speaking and leaned forward, tilting my face toward one of the glows. “Carlon, you’re an idiot. I told everyone to be looking for any of the people involved with that glass gargoyle debacle. What, if a skirt doesn’t twitch your pants you don’t even look at her face? This is the digger in the middle of it all. Saryn?”

I thought about lying, but the look on his face told me that while his man Carlon didn’t recognize me, he did. “Taryn. My name is Taryn. But I can’t help you with stolen artifacts.” I sat up a bit straighter. “I won’t help you with them.” I shook my head and dropped my voice. The leader was crude, but hopefully he was smarter than he looked. “Look, those artifacts won’t be worth anything. The only thing they can do is destroy things.”

Locksead was a human mix, most of his features were human, but he had shock white hair that almost looked like feathers, and cold blue eyes. He nodded and smiled, but his smile was crueler than a syclarion’s frown. “They are worth a lot more than your life to the right people. And if you don’t help us, we will find another way to make money off of you.” He looked me up and down. “Carlon wasn’t right when he said you weren’t worth it. You’re not ugly, but we’d have to run you for a few dozen years in the red district of Kenithworth to even get part of what some folks will pay for just one of those artifacts.” He rocked back on his heels. “I wouldn’t like that, and I know you wouldn’t like it. So how about you help us with identifying some of these pieces?”

I felt like I might throw up, so instead I nodded. There was no way I would help them find these things and sell them to the highest bidder. No wonder there had been so many more robberies and crimes as of late. The criminally rich and terrible of other cities, most likely other lands, had noticed Beccia. And like the way this man looked at me, it wasn’t in a good way.

Locksead leaned down closer to my face. He didn’t smell bad at all. They might look like crude thieves and kidnappers, but their leader at least believed in hygiene. I pulled back when I thought that he would try to kiss me, but instead, he smiled and pulled out a piece of tile from inside his vest. “Now, see here, keep your eyes on my face like I am the most interesting man in the world and I am trying to woo you to my bed. I want you to look at this and tell me what you see.”

He held the tile up but our bodies were so close I had to twist a bit to see it. It was a piece of broken brown tile used in some houses for roofing. No marks, no images, and clearly hadn’t been in the ground for a few hundred years. He crumbled the edges of it when I told him that.

“Thank you. So this wasn’t what you pulled off the wall of that pit, was it?” His voice was doing a good two-headed snake impression. If I said it wasn’t, then that Carlon would have it out for me, and I didn’t think he was safe at all. However, if I said it was, Locksead could probably tell and do what he threatened to do.

I finally shook my head no.

I’d expected Locksead to get angry or violent, but he laughed and threw the piece behind him. “I know. But I wanted to make sure you’d keep honest with me.” He waved to one of the guys from the back room. “Tag, help our new friend up and show her what we’ve found so far.”

The man who came up was slender, not much taller than me, and almost looked like an innocent kid. Until you saw the eyes. They probably used him to con his way into places. If you put Qianru’s livery on him, he could easily pass as one of her houseboys.

“What about my hands?” It was a little awkward for Tag to get me to my feet since my hands were still behind my back. I couldn’t help him tied up like this.

“You don’t need your hands to look, and that’s all we’re going to have you do. For now.” Locksead got to his feet and walked into the larger cavern.

It took us a few tries but Tag and I got me to my feet. He held onto my arm as he walked me into the cavern. Which was probably good as otherwise I may have fallen back down again.

It wasn’t a cavern. We were in a mostly preserved, with the exception of a few hairline cracks radiating from a jagged hole in the middle of the far top, elven ballroom. Maybe it wasn’t just Carlon’s bedroom skills that had kept Orenda here.

Tag pulled me forward when I kept standing there. “Yup, she’s one of them diggers, that’s for sure.” His accent was almost exactly like Joie and Qianru’s other houseboys. Maybe he had been a houseboy from the south who had decided to branch out.

“Carlon, I need to show her the finds,” Tag yelled to the cavern in general, but I didn’t see the man in brown. His propensity for dark clothing and surly attitude made me think of Alric when I first met him. Except that Carlon was much taller and heavier than Alric.

“The stuff for her to look at is on the far left table. Just write down what she says.” One of the gypsy wagons rocked a bit and Carlon’s voice came from it. Hopefully he was just moving about and didn’t have another doxy in there.

“Eh, don’t mind him.” Tag smiled and turned me down the hall. “Assassins are always cranky and crazy.”

Carlon had almost seemed to be playing with me when I was fighting him for the tile. That wasn’t cranky. It could be crazy though. “He’s an assassin?”

Tag’s smile dropped and he glanced around to see who was nearby. All the workers were either in their own wagons or in the opposite end of the cavern. “He is one of the best. I’ve only been part of this gang for two years; he’s been here longer in fits and starts. Doesn’t seem to like to stay in one place for too long, ya see? But he always finds us.” Tag drifted off into his own thoughts for a bit, then shook his head and came back. “He’s killed more than thirty people just since I’ve been here. Most were orders from Locksead, but some were for his own pleasure.” He shuddered. “I’d stay clear of him if I were you. I do.”

I thought back to what I’d heard from him and agreed. He may have been playing with me in the beginning; he wasn’t when we got here though.

I nodded. “Now where are your artifacts?” I did not intend to give them correct information, but I could string them along for a while and find out what they knew and what exactly they were looking for. We hadn’t even thought of people outside of Beccia hearing about the two deadly artifacts, but we should have.

That made me think of my friends. Someone would have to be missing me by now, right? I tried hard not to think of the faeries. I was sure the shock to my magic system blowing up that sceanra anam was still messing me up. However, the last thing I wanted would be for these maniacs to grab my faeries. In addition, who knew how much an actual Ancient construct could go for these days?

Naturally, the first thing Tag showed me was something I knew the girls would love. A tiny doll carriage. Unlike their castle, which was only a few hundred years old, and not an artifact, this was pure elven design from the top of the domed roof to the filigree decorating the sides. It was big enough for a doll about twice as tall as one of the faeries, so many of them could comfortably fit inside. Actually, the inside was amazing. It wasn’t a carriage at all but a traveler’s caravan, down to a way to connect it to miniature horses.

“Where did you find this?” It didn’t look like anything anyone around here had ever dug up and I found myself envious of the diggers who found it.

“In a house,” Tag said then shrugged. They’d stolen it. For a moment I’d allowed myself to forget I was among thieves and not honest diggers. It was hard to do with the piles of relics they had lying around. “We’ve found some stuff on our own. We were going to dig that pit when they found you and decided to pull back. Did you make it?”

I looked up from my examination of the caravan car, it was truly amazing. “Did I make what?”

“The pit.” He looked around and dropped his voice. “Locksead has been freaked out with all the explosions around here. He says none of them were natural and something bigger than us is coming to town.”

This kid should give up being a thief and go into storytelling. Just the way he said the last bit made the skin on the back of my neck crawl. It could also be doing that about whatever could freak out a cold man like Locksead.

“What does Carlon think?” Locksead might also be concerned if his profit was in danger. It was clear what his sole motivation was. Carlon however….

Tag shook his head. “I think he’s worried too.” A hardened thief would never be this chatty with a prisoner. Most likely Tag was younger than he was trying to be. “He took off a few days ago and just came back last night, but looked really worried. He and Locksead were in deep talks for over an hour and both came out looking more upset than when they went in.”

Now that was unsettling. I personally didn’t know any, but one would think cold-blooded assassins would take a lot to upset.

“So back to this, is this Ancient or elven?” Tag was done chatting and all business. And testing me. I hoped this kid didn’t play cards, he’d lose his shirt.

“Obviously elven, probably from the fifth dynasty, or in common speak, about three hundred years before the vanishing.” I almost said Breaking, but that term hadn’t become common knowledge and I wanted to keep some things to myself.

“Good girl,” Tag smiled and set the toy down. “We already knew that. But this one, we don’t.” Without even looking for approval, he went around me and untied my hands. Obviously, Locksead had already set that up. I wondered what would have happened had I lied.

He picked up a large piece covered in fabric. It was flat and about two feet by three feet. He carefully removed the fabric although I wasn’t sure why he was being so cautious. It took a lot more than some linen to damage metal. Especially this metal.

He was holding up a huge piece of that damn sarcophagus.

Unlike the single squares that we’d found floating around, this was a single sheet that contained about fifteen of the squares. Unless there was more than one of these, this thing had been split up and scattered all over Beccia. I examined a few dents and wondered, not for the first time, if this was the damn one I’d almost drowned in, or if there were a bunch of these lingering around in the abandoned aqueducts under Beccia.

“Where did you steal this one from?” I rubbed the edges carefully; they didn’t look rough, but it could be deceiving. They were very smooth. Too smooth. I gently picked the sheet up off of Tag’s hands, I knew how tough these pieces were, but he obviously felt different.

“We didn’t rob that one.” He pointed toward the wagon at the far end. “Carlon found it out digging around about three months ago.” He dropped his voice into his storyteller mode. “That’s what started the rift between him and Locksead. Carlon told him that was all he found, Locksead didn’t believe him.” He narrowed his eyes and slowly nodded his head as if that said so much more than what he was speaking.

“That, and Locksead liked the elf girl when we found her. Carlon wooed her away immediately and that widened the rift. I’m surprised Carlon came back this last time. That must have been something important he told Locksead when he came back.”

I kept my eyes on the sarcophagus as if I was still trying to figure it out, but my mind was whirling. I knew Carlon had lied to Locksead about the tile. Considering I didn’t know what was really on the tile, and therefore didn’t know if it was worth lying about, I had to assume he did understand part of it. Now he also lied about this metal. There was no way this thing came out of the ground like this, the edges were freshly cut, and probably with a mage blade. One thing I knew, I did not want to get in between Locksead and Carlon when the two finally had a showdown.

“So tell me about this elf girl. Was she like you all?” I pointed toward the workers on the far end. None of them looked like people you’d want to meet in a dark alley, but there were a few women in the group as well. They looked more dangerous than most of the men.

“Orenda? Naw.” Tag’s blush told me he’d been smitten by the elf maiden but was way too low on the pecking order to even think about it. “Locksead found her up north a bit. He at first thought she was in disguise, or a breed, but turns out she’s a full-blooded elf. Her tribe lives far up north somewhere and she escaped to come down here.”

There was a huge dose of awe there. Not only was he smitten, he was also in elf-worship mode. That would change if Glorinal was alive and Tag ever had the dubious honor of running into him.