The Emerald Dragon (The Lost Ancients Book 3) (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

The shuffling sound was coming from a creature easily ten feet high, but it looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. Long, black, decaying strands of something I hoped wasn’t flesh dripped off the form as it moved toward the pit. I couldn’t make out any features, so I couldn’t even tell if we had another troll zombie on our hands. However, if this thing was a zombie, the original owner had died many years ago.

There wasn’t much of a wind this deep in the thick forest, but unfortunately what there was changed direction. I was wrong. That thing had died long before even the elves had taken off and had been kept stored in a giant pickling jar of rotten produce. That was the only way I could explain that odor.

The thing twitched as it moved forward, then almost stumbled, but pulled itself back upright, and shambled closer to the pit the explosion had made.

I closed my eyes briefly, and focused on Crusty Bucket, danger, and staying put. I made sure the danger thought was aimed at her and Bunky, not me. I didn’t want them flying right into whatever this thing was in a misguided attempt to rescue me.

I needn’t have worried too much. The walking pile of decaying plant life was shrinking as it took its steps closer to the pit. Rather, parts of it were dropping off.

By the time it finally made it to the edge of the pit, there was nothing left except a decaying head of cabbage that rolled unceremoniously into the pit. As long as it didn’t manage to land on Crusty or Bunky, they should be safe.

I was about to climb out of my hiding spot—again—when a troop of brownies came into view. One of them might have been the one Garbage had brought in, but I couldn’t tell for sure. They all looked alike, and even if they hadn’t, they were covered in the same disgusting goop as the creature that just disintegrated had been.

They were yelling at each other in a language I didn’t understand, but many of the words sounded like swear words. One or two words stood out.

A golem. Those crazy little bastards had managed to make a golem out of rotting tree parts.

Seven brownies all waved at the pit and yelled at each other. Alric had been teaching me some fighting skills along with the magic, but even so, I might need back up. Providing a second giant shambling pile of decaying shrubbery didn’t come down the trail, the girls and I should be able to chase them off.

Armed with my knife, I jumped out of the bushes. I also whistled for the girls and Bunky and sent a thought imagining all the brownies as ale bottles.

The brownies turned at my sudden appearance. It was rumored the little guys could smell as well as a bloodhound, but with the layer of ooze on them, I wasn’t surprised they didn’t know that the girls or I were here.

They
were surprised, however. “Ah! Magic! Our enemies have found us!” The muck-covered brownie closest to me shrieked and charged forward with a sword that probably had an earlier life holding appetizers in a high-end restaurant.

I kicked him away before he even got within skewering distance. Then Garbage Blossom and Leaf Grub swooped down and did a low fly-by over the slime-encrusted brownies. The girls weren’t arguing anymore, but it could be a temporary truce. Unfortunately, with their memories it could be a long time, if ever, before I found out what they were fighting about.

The brownies screamed again. Perhaps they should use that high-pitched sound as a weapon instead of the cocktail skewers they were waving around; it was annoying enough that it would make people run away.

They were jabbering in their own language and backing toward the pit. Garbage and Leaf were playing with them, enjoying whatever adversarial relationship the two species had. Until Crusty and Bunky came charging up out of the pit.

Crusty was waving a sharpened piece of root in one hand, and a cloth bag dribbling gold coins and rocks in the other. She was also yelling what I was sure she felt was a fierce war cry but mostly seemed to be about minkies doing their laundry in the brownies’ mouths.

I may have misunderstood as the remaining six brownies—the one I kicked was still down but I had a feeling he was faking it to stay out of trouble—all started screeching some more. I had to block my ears with my hands when they hit even higher pitch levels as they got a good look at Bunky.

Crusty swung the bag with the coins and rocks around her head before I realized what she was doing.

“No! Crusty! Don’t throw it!” Most likely that was what was left of the bag The Hill folks were looking for, and equally possibly what the brownies had made the golem to go retrieve. Too late, my excitable, but not always the sharpest cheese in the pantry, faery had flung the bag at the lead brownie, bowling him into three of his friends. Judging by the size of it, and the way it was leaking, my only satisfaction was that most of the coins that had been in it were on the ground. Not to mention, it looked like it had far more rocks than coins in it when she brought it up.

The brownies grabbed their fallen comrades and raced out of there.

“We win!” Crusty started dancing on top of Bunky, tumbled off, and almost fell back into the pit before she remembered she could fly.

Garbage and Leaf drifted down and started picking up the coins scattered around the mouth of the pit.

“Okay, girls and Bunky, I need you to gather all of the coins and give them to me.” Garbage had her back to me and from her furtive arm movements I was sure she was stuffing one or more coins into one of their bags. The bags could hold just about anything and were so spelled that trying to find anything once it got in there was almost impossible. Unless you were one of the faeries anyway.

“Including those, Garbage.”

She turned, shoved the bag back wherever they went when they weren’t being used, which meant it looked like she shoved it into thin air to me, and brought three coins to me. Bunky didn’t really have arms, so there was nothing for him to grab anything with. His short, stumpy baby goat legs didn’t help gathering them on the ground either.

“Bunky, why don’t you keep an eye on the ground from up there? You can tell us if we’ve missed any, and warn us if those brownies come back.” These couldn’t possibly be the only coins in the original bag. Crusty, or someone, had filled the bag with rocks, with only a few dozen or so coins in the bottom. Judging from what we found anyway. A quick peer down the pit didn’t show any more coins.

Bunky buzzed in agreement and flew up to the lowest branch level over the pit. I still wanted him and the girls to go back into the pit and search it more, but I didn’t want to take a chance with the gold lying about. Whether it was the real Alric or one of the changelings who swindled it, I figured I’d keep it until we figured out why it was taken and what happened to the rest of it. And I didn’t want it going back into cat racing. No one from the criminal world had questioned the faeries’ little side business, but we needed to keep it that way.

While they were doing that, I worked on gathering the pieces that had flown over by the trail the brownies had come down. Now that I knew the shambling creature had been a golem, the bits and pieces didn’t look as creepy and disturbing. They also didn’t smell as bad. Either I had lost all sense of smell, or they were breaking down at an accelerated rate. I found a stick and used it to lift up one of the slimy strands. To my surprise, it wasn’t slimy, but rapidly drying and crumbling into itself.

I picked up two more strands and saw the same thing happening. Alric had only barely touched on golems as a concept, but the magic to animate them was supposed to be almost as much as trying to create a zombie. Brownies were also not a well-known topic, since they weren’t native to this part of the world. But they weren’t reputed to be great spell casters.

So where did a bunch of brownies get enough power to make a golem but not have enough power to keep it running? Even as the thoughts were going through my head, the strand of former golem was passing into dust.

The brownies must have had help. Whether they were the ones behind the explosion that caused the pit was also a question for another day.

Bunky kept a good eye on the girls, buzzing loudly if one of them tried to slip a gold coin into one of their bags. I should have thought of Bunky as faery-nursemaid months ago when he decided to stay with us.

“Do we have them all?” I’d noticed the girls were shuffling around, but hadn’t picked up any more coins for almost a full minute. At their nods, I waved them to me. It had only been a few minutes, yet they were clearly bored to tears.

“Crusty? Did you and Bunky find anything down the hole?” I had a feeling that plenty of things were down there, and I belatedly realized I should have narrowed it down for my little wonder-drunk. I was about to clarify when she pointed behind me.

“Them. No see then, but smelled them.” She nodded. “Now see them.”

I spun around to see three sceanra anam rising out of the pit behind me.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I would be leaving it out of my telling of this encounter later on, but I screamed so loudly I was surprised no one from the center of town came running to check on me. Hell, it was loud enough I was surprised no one came from the far south to check.

All three were hovering over the pit, not moving quickly, but the way their entire bodies moved like a water snake in the air, even when holding a single position they looked like they were heading for you.

Or they
were
heading for me.

I took two shaky steps backwards, and found they flew forward an equal distance. They weren’t doing anything threatening, but when you were long, lean, and had more teeth than anyone could possibly count, you didn’t have to do anything to threaten people.

“Girls? Shouldn’t you be doing something about them?” Granted it had been larger groups of faeries that had taken out the creatures before, but these three should at least be worried about the faeries.

“Girls?” I didn’t want to risk my life to look around but they were being awfully quiet.

“Bunky?” I couldn’t count on him. The last flying snake we saw went after Bunky, but at least if I knew he was around, I’d feel better.

Nope, not a single buzz. Bunky and the girls had taken off and left me here.

“It’s just you three and me then. Until the roaming gang of wild faeries comes through here.” I had no idea if those flying monstrosities could understand me, but I needed to try.

The sceanra anam nearest me tilted its head as if it was listening. Or maybe it was trying to size up its next meal better. I had one knife, against three of them. And they could fly. Not a fair fight by even faery standards.

However, I also had magic. Questionable. Weak. Untrustworthy, but would definitely give me a headache, magic.

I hated to keep trying to use it. All of Alric’s warnings about not going further than I was ready to kept bouncing around my head. However, the sceanra anam had finished communing with the pit or whatever it was they were doing and their eyes now narrowed and focused on me.

I’d get one shot, then I knew whatever spell I picked would slam back into me and I’d be down. I had to make the shot count.

I pushed out all the fear of pain and the flying snakes and fashioned a spell of movement. As I wanted those things to move as far from here as possible. This specific spell was about as far over my head as the faeries were to advanced hypothetical calculus. On a surface level, it appeared to be similar to the first spell I did, pushing open a door, or sending an annoying satyr halfway through a forest. But it was far more complex.

I gathered the spell in my head, then, as Alric had tried to teach me, flung the spell outward.

I managed to hit the lead sceanra anam with enough force to burst it in midair. There wasn’t even enough of him left to drift to the ground.

Of course that meant I still had two more sceanra anam, a massively building spell headache, and I felt like I was rapidly losing the ability to move.

It only took a few seconds for the remaining two sceanra anam to realize who had blown up their friend, and about another full second before they flew right at me. I held up my knife. It wasn’t enough, but I wasn’t going down without a fight.

I’d made one swing, which totally missed the flying snake and reminded me how much that spell took out of me, when screeching faeries came swarming down. Bunky stayed above the swarm, which seemed to consist of every single non-wild faery in the area. My three were in the lead, of course. But then they pulled up right before the sceanra anam and waved the others forward.

Both of the flying snakes seemed torn between the easy prey before them—me—and their fear of the crazed faeries.

However, once the first wave of faeries charged forward, the sceanra anam decided to flee.

Unlike the one that had been trapped in the halls of the university, these had many ways to escape.

The faeries let out a wild mixture of calls and yells and took off after them.

Except my three.

The exhaustion from the spell wore off extremely fast, most likely due to adrenaline, which meant it was postponed, not worn off. I waved to the faeries to show I was okay. They flew forward, but didn’t seem to be worried about my condition. All three looked toward the direction the swarm had gone.

“Girls? Why did you take off like that? Couldn’t you have at least chased those things away?” I was glad for the assist, but it would have been better to have started with it.

“We need to train. Good training.” Garbage folded her arms and scowled at the air where the one I blew up had disintegrated. “These hard to find now. No waste them.” Her scowl switched to me and I realized that far from being concerned about me, Garbage was upset that I’d destroyed one of their training toys. To save my own life.

“You remember. No waste.” With that solid admonishment, including a tiny, stern finger shake, Garbage led the other two and Bunky in pursuit of their students and the soon to be dead sceanra anam.

I wasn’t sure if I was more upset about her disregard for my safety or the fact she said they were getting harder to find. The first, and only, birth of them had been witnessed by myself, my patroness Qianru, and a collection of impeccably trained houseboys. But we had only seen five.

Since I was pretty sure that I’d already seen at least that many, and the girls were upset about them vanishing, I had to guess they were in far greater numbers than we thought. Considering that the history books had little on them, and no one had been able to capture an intact sample alive or dead, I doubted I would get my answers anytime soon.

I began to think that I should have stayed with Covey in town. Then an image of the rich politicians she faced came into my head. I shuddered.

Nope, better to deal with badly made golems, misguided brownies, and exploding sceanra anam.

I gathered the coins that had been re-scattered and peered into the pit. I wished I’d been able to get more details of what Crusty and Bunky had seen. Maybe they’d recall some of it when they came home. My house should be finished by now, so we could have a nice quiet night in.

There wasn’t much I could see from the top of the pit. There was little doubt it had been the result of a deep explosion. Unlike the radiating crack through the forest, I could see to the bottom here. It was at least forty feet deep, but without a snap-glow or rope, I had no way to be sure.

The only question was what had happened to the dirt. An explosion that large should have flung dirt, rocks, and small plants all around the forest. Yet the pit and the crack had little dirt around them, and even going out a ways into the forest, I didn’t see any debris.

Now, granted, I had inadvertently exploded the sceanra anam to such a degree that it disintegrated, but I doubted too many people would be using a spell of that level just to avoid having rocks and debris around.

There appeared to be a layer of something almost two feet down from the edge of the pit. It was hard to see what it was; all I could tell for sure was that it seemed smoother than the rest of the pit and darker. I wanted to call the girls back, but even thinking about calling them caused my head to throb so badly I almost threw up.

I also didn’t feel up to walking all the way back to town and getting a rope. I walked around the pit completely, trying to see if I could make out anything in the band.

The far side from where I had been seemed a bit closer to the band, so I lay on the ground and tried to reach down as far as I could. If I couldn’t get myself down to the band, maybe part of it could come up to me.

I had enough of a ledge on the pit to feel the band, but I couldn’t see it. It had looked like a solid band but it wasn’t. I could feel the rough edges where pieces of something cold and hard fit together. Sections of dirt told me where pieces were missing. Feeling around really gave me no clue as to what it was, how most of it had survived whatever explosion caused the pit, or where it came from. I slid my fingers back over to one of the missing areas, trying to pry a piece up.

My plan worked a little too well as I felt the piece I was trying to pull off suddenly gave way and I heard the tinkling noise it made as it fell down into the pit. A round of swearing didn’t help, nor did my quickly aborted attempt to call the faeries again. Whatever I’d done when I blew up the flying snake was messing with any magic I had going right now.

I flopped on my back to see if it helped the horrific pounding and nausea caused from trying to call the girls, but also to see if perhaps they were returning on their own.

It helped the spinning, but there wasn’t a single faery wing in sight. With my luck, those damn sceanra anam had probably taken off to another county.

I rolled back over and tried reaching down even further but I still couldn’t get to the bottom edge. The piece felt like tile and had raised parts. However, beyond trying to convince myself it was not a collection of emerald dragons, I couldn’t tell what they were.

So I went back to where I’d lost the previous piece and tried again. Slower this time and with only one hand so that I could hopefully catch the piece before it fell.

It seemed like an hour before I felt something start to come loose. It spoke a lot to whoever put these here that even after a major explosion right next to them they stayed in place.

I wiggled the piece slowly, like a loose tooth, until it came off. After all the time I’d spent on the damn thing, I might have very well jumped in after it if I dropped another one.

The piece looked like aged porcelain, but was cool, and felt more like metal. Tapping on it sounded like metal as well. The backside was scored and covered in dirt from where it had been wedged into the earth.

No emerald dragons. I let out a sigh of relief at that. However, what was there didn’t look terribly friendly. The piece was a bit smaller than the palm of my hand, but covered in strange symbols and letters that could only be described as hostile. There was no other way to describe it. The words, if that’s what they were, were sharp and jagged. None of the symbols looked at all familiar, but they did look like they’d been made in anger.

That was weird. I obviously couldn’t read it; I’d never even seen this form of image writing before in my life. Yet it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and an overwhelming urge to throw this back into the pit filled my head.

I think the only reason I didn’t toss it away was because I’d worked so hard for the damn thing. I pulled myself away from the edge of the pit, and eased up into a sitting position.

I needed to find something to wrap up this thing; the more I looked at it the less I wanted to touch it. I was surrounded by leaves, any of which would make a great wrap.

I hid the carved tile in the high grass in front of the nearest tree, and started climbing up it. I’d just reached the big leaves when I saw movement below me.

A man completely in brown walked right to where I’d hidden the tile, found it in a matter of seconds, then held it up to me in salute and walked away. He was wearing a large floppy hat, and a mask of some dun-colored fabric. All I could see were coal black eyes that looked far too smug with himself.

I was exhausted from my adventures out here so far, but that gesture wiped out all of the fatigue. After all I went through and someone was going to walk off with it? I don’t think so.

I stuffed the leaves in my shirt, then jumped out of the tree and landed on the person in brown.

Based on the size and build, I’d guess it was male, and he had a good foot on me in height. But I had the advantage of falling from a distance, so I managed to take us both down.

Since even a slight thought of maybe trying to use magic on him sent a stabbing pain into my head, I started punching.

He was good. I only got a few good shots in before he rolled to his feet then started blocking my punches when I followed. But when he blocked me, it was every hit. It looked like he had a sword under his cloak, but he wasn’t going for it, nor even fighting back.

Then I got in a sneaky shot Covey had taught me to his lower back. He stumbled forward then came up swinging. I danced backwards and realized he wasn’t swinging as much as grabbing.

I smacked his hands away, sneaking in a few more jabs. I might have even been able to take him down if a voice behind me hadn’t broken my concentration.

“Stop playing and grab her. Thanks to you, the elf girl got away. We’ll bring in this one. We need to make the meet.”

I spun to see this person I hadn’t even heard approach, and my attacker in brown took the brief distraction and pinned my arms. A moment later a bag was over my head, a silencing spell bag unless my attackers had suddenly gone mute, and rough rope was coiled around my hands.