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Chapter Six

Nothing in the fire or the remains of the chest could be traced back to the faeries which meant I was clear. Unless, of course, whoever hid it there had been around to see the fire and had seen the girls buzzing around. I pocketed the undamaged—and still locked—lock. You never knew when evidence would be needed.

Since I’d only arrived at the end of the fire, I didn’t know for sure who had been around when it first started—but I could guess one person.

Harlan had been acting more paranoid and mysterious than usual after the battle. He’d always been one to see hidden threats in his morning cereal, but now he was acting upon them. He’d even gone so far as to tell his patron he needed to go out of town for the last month. I hadn’t seen him, but I had a feeling he’d been in town the entire time.

Now the question would be how deep undercover he was playing things. That he wouldn’t be at home was a given. He often pretended to go out of town just to get a break from his four wives, so even if he wasn’t sure someone was watching him he wouldn’t go there.

And I knew he was sure someone was watching him. His conspiracy theories actually made him a great digger—he often noticed connections in the ruins that no one else did. But he could also go around the bend on them.

He hadn’t believed me about Alric, or the second glass gargoyle, but he did believe that there was something far bigger than a megalomaniac syclarion behind the entire glass gargoyle attack. So if he was following his hunches, and his hunches led him to an odd tree fire, and got him here probably before the fire, at least long enough to cut down a bunch of sticks, then he most likely went to ground somewhere nearby.

I did need to get up at a disgustingly early hour, but with the girls out, an early bedtime wasn’t going to happen. I might as well see what Harlan knew about the tree flambé and make sure the girls’ involvement wasn’t going to be a problem.

The area on this side of the park-let was mostly small tenement houses, the kind an undercover chataling could easily afford to rent for a few weeks. It was a matter of which one looked the cleanest.

Even when going deep undercover, Harlan could never get around the chatalings’ cleaning obsessions. I pointed out that gave him away on many occasions but he insisted it was simply superior spy work from others.

The first two buildings were clearly staying upright solely based on dirt and grime. The third looked promising until I realized the entire building was being lived in by a tribe of gypsies. Harlan hated them almost more than dirt.

Which left the fourth building. Three stories tall with a suspiciously clean right front window on the second story.

I shook my head, Harlan better hope he never had to hide for real.

The stairs leading up creaked so much that I had second thoughts. But since I knew Harlan outweighed me by a good bit, I kept going. He may have rigged them to let him know when his imagined enemies were near.

The door to my right was pristine and clean even if it looked like it had started life about the time of the Ancients. A few sharp knocks brought nothing. At least nothing until I heard a thump followed by some very cat-like swearing.

“Look, Harlan, I know you’re in there. Just open the door so we can talk, okay?” I kept my voice low. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t want to completely blow his cover with his neighbors. If I could help it.

A shuffling sound approached the other side of the door. “No, no one name that here. You go away now.” The voice was high pitched and trying to sound old. And a perfect copy of the imitation he used when mocking the lead harridan from the Antiquities Museum.

“Now I know it’s you.” I looked around for anything I could use to get him to open the door. I didn’t want to bring out the magical lock, and I also didn’t want to mention the fire here in the hall. The floor appeared abandoned, but most likely a dozen ears were listening for information they could use for some gain.

Ah. “If you don’t open that door right now, I’m going to ask Crusty Bucket to start singing. Loudly. And she’s been sitting in an ale bottle for the last half-hour.” He didn’t know I didn’t have the girls with me. I was pretty sure they’d had coins on them when they took off, but since they never paid for drinks, I had no idea what they were doing with them.

The door swung open so fast that I almost fell into the room. Harlan didn’t step into the hall but motioned for me to come in. He slammed the door shut the moment I crossed the threshold.

Chatalings looked like giant, bipedal cats, and in Harlan’s current state he looked like a giant, bipedal cat who had been left out on the streets for a few years. He still had most of his homeless drunk costume on, but had started taking some of the makeup off the thin gray fur on his face.

“You found me. Who else knows? And please, don’t ask the girls to sing. It took me forever to find this place. I don’t want to have to go find another.”

He looked so dejected that I took pity. “I don’t have the girls. They took off after that fire went out. What do you know about it, Harlan? Why were the girls wearing their war feathers?”

He motioned for me to sit on a shabby chair and he took its mate. “It’s what I was trying to tell you last month in the pub. I know there is something going on up on The Hill, something that could bring doom to us all.”

I leaned back in my chair, then thought better of it when I heard the wood groan.

“I’ve been doing a lot of reconnaissance, and I can tell you that there has been a change brewing with our wealthy overlords.” He’d looked worried and dejected when I came in, but he now bounded to his feet and began expanding on his theory. “It may have started prior to the engagement with the syclarion known as Thaddeus. Alas, I was not focusing my observational skills on them at the time as we had more urgent and violent persons to worry about. But, since we thwarted that attack, I have been able to ascertain a type of movement on The Hill never seen before.”

His tail was whipping about madly.

That was interesting. His tail rarely whipped about in any fashion.

“I found pieces of a golden sarcophagus in the trash. The trash! I know the idle rich aren’t as savvy as us, but still, even they wouldn’t throw such things away. Clearly, they are not all who we think they are.”

That answered what his “studies” had been—digging through rich people’s trash. I wondered, and not for the first time, about a member of a hyper-clean race who seemed obsessed with going through other people’s trash. Both modern and ancient.

His momentum died down as he stopped to ponder something.

“And do I get to see these great treasures?” I finally prodded him when he stayed lost in thought too long. I was going to have to direct things back to the fire, the tree, and the faeries, but it was often easier to let Harlan ramble a bit first.

“What?” He shook himself. Obviously he’d gone deep into his own thoughts. Or, more likely, he’d been solo for a month and was now more used to talking to himself than another person. “Oh, yes, yes. Quite interesting. They don’t seem to be from our dig, but another community completely.” He went to the desk shoved in the corner, fiddled with a lock, then took out five battered pieces of hammered metal.

They were gold, but mixed with something else to give them a strength no gold had. Designs had been hammered in the pieces and most of them looked like a funerary box.

And they looked familiar.

A few days before the battle, I’d fallen into an underground ravine and a large copper and gold sarcophagus. I’d lamented not being able to find my way back to it after Alric and the faeries rescued me, but when I’d left it, it was more or less intact. I could get a much closer look at the hammered designs now than I could tumbling down some ancient aqueduct fighting for my life.

“These aren’t elven.” I had put down the first piece and started studying the second when a buzzing, like words in another room, started building in my head. I knew these. Beyond my brief meeting in the water, I
knew
these. If I could just figure out what the words were saying—

“Now, I don’t know that I’d go that far.” Harlan’s comment broke me free of whatever I’d slipped into while looking at the pieces. It seemed important, but no matter how much I tried I couldn’t get it back. Maybe he’d let me borrow one of them.

“As I was saying, I feel these are from a distant dig, perhaps another clan of elves completely.”

I shook my head and waggled a piece at him. “Harlan, these are Ancients’ artifacts. I fell into one of these in the ruins a few months ago. There’s a deep aqueduct system underneath this town and this thing was stuck in it.” At his scowl I tapped on the metal. “Right here, have you ever seen elves use that symbol? It’s the Ancients.”

He stood there with narrowed eyes and a lashing tail for a good thirty seconds. I’d taken away his theory, or at least punched nice big holes in it, and he wasn’t one to take that easily.

Finally he shuffled over and took a closer look. A soft growling came from low in his throat, but it was more a statement of annoyance than aggression. I was right, and he knew it.

“They still could be elves from another area. Maybe they adapted the Ancients’ ways and languages more than the local ones did.” His scowl vanished and a victorious look took over. “Yes, that would fit in quite nicely. There is something going on in the south and there are members on The Hill involved. Mark my words, this came from the south.”

Now I knew he just wanted to argue. Obviously, being away from his dig site and his usually equally cantankerous cronies had left him spoiling for a fight.

I picked up all five pieces and walked around him to the desk. I could relate to wanting to fight for the sake of it, but not tonight. “Look, Harlan, I agree the symbols on these are different, even for Ancient script. But we don’t have much to go on, and since I’m pretty much the closest thing to an Ancient expert in this town, I think we’ll agree to disagree for now.” I started opening drawers, looking for materials. Even though the outside was shabby and worn the contents were new and neat.

I took out a long sheet of thin paper, put it next to the artifacts, and rummaged some more.

“Even if they could be Ancient, and I’m not saying they are or are not mind you, you can’t take them. They are evidence! ”

I waved my hand that was filled with a bunch of thick charcoal sticks. “I wouldn’t dream of taking them, you know that.” Okay, I might, but I wasn’t going to admit it to him. “I want to copy them so I can look at them later. While I’m copying, you need to tell me about the fire, the faeries, and the chest. And fast. Some of us do need to be at work in the morning.”

“Harrumph.” Harlan was the only person I knew who could say that and have it sound like it should. Perhaps you had to have official curmudgeon cred to make it work. “Just don’t damage them while you’re copying.”

I nodded, although if these were from the sarcophagus I’d gone crashing through the Ancient aqueducts in, I’d already done far more damage than I’d be doing by making rubbings of the symbols.

“Very well, the girls have been helping me out from time to time with some odd jobs.” He held up one paw-like hand to ward off my comments. “It wasn’t my suggestion, nor was it my choice, they wore their feathers today. Garbage was bored, so I thought having her and the others hunt things down for me might keep them out of trouble.”

His words started fading out as I worked the charcoal over one particularly ornate piece. The images were extremely detailed and I found myself wondering how they were made. The weird buzzing started in the back of my head again. And again it was Harlan that broke the spell.

“Did you want to hear this or not? I am busy, too, you know.”

He was much closer to me than he had been when he’d started and I really wanted to ask how long I’d drifted off. But the lashing tail told me I probably shouldn’t.

“Yes, I do. So you corrupted my faeries, then they set fire to a tree?” I went back to the rubbing, but I kept my eyes up. Whatever the pieces were triggering was fascinating, but I’d want to find out more about them before I let it happen again.

I got a few extra tail lashings with that one, then Harlan gave a huge sigh, ruffled the fur on his head, and dropped into a sofa that looked old enough to be an artifact itself.

“No, I didn’t corrupt them, and I don’t think they set fire to that tree. I’d asked them to follow this suspicious looking fellow two days ago. He appeared a few days prior to that, trying to look like one of our vagabonds, but he was a little too practiced if you know what I mean.”

I nodded even though I had no idea.

“He didn’t smell right either. There was a clean layer under his disgusting aroma. Plus, he was hunting in my area. I was the one who worked on this theory of something going on up on The Hill. I couldn’t have some hooligan interloper trying to work in.”

Alric. It had to be Alric.

Something of the annoyance I felt must have shown on my face. Harlan pounced on it faster than a drunk on a free drink.

“You know who it is, don’t you? Are you working with someone else?” The hurt in his voice reminded me that for all his bravado and bluster, Harlan was really just a big softie.

“I don’t. You know I’d never go to someone else for conspiracies. You’ll always be my guy.” I flashed him a smile and he settled back in his sofa. “The man you’re speaking of was at the Shimmering Dewdrop last night. We had a bit of a ruckus and had to clear the place out. Your friend was a difficult one to get to leave.”