The Glass Gargoyle (The Lost Ancients Book 1) (9 page)

My mouth went dry as I moved closer. I had to be sure before I said anything to anyone.

The clothing was burnt through, but from the remains it looked like standard digger wear. And the few tufts of hair were faded red.

Chapter 10

A rustle behind me made me jump up and forward. Only a strong sense of self-preservation kept me from falling into the decomposing body.

I spun toward my attacker.

Only to have three bright blurs of color slam into the side of my head.

“Damn it!” I compensated for the impact of the faeries and forced myself to overbalance away from the rotting corpse. Getting the faeries to stop their recent habit of slamming into me was going to be a priority once my life got back to normal.

“What are you three doing here?” I had dropped to one knee, but my three freeloaders were still on my head. “Get off.” I waved my hands to try to dislodge them but only Crusty let go. And that was just to fly toward the body.

“Is very dead.” Her voice had about the same sound it had when she was out of beer. She buzzed over the body, but I noticed she wouldn’t get much lower than a few feet above the ground. Faeries weren’t squeamish, as a species, or at least the three members of the species I’d had living with me, they were the most anti-squeamish beings around.

So why wasn’t she buzzing lower? And the other two were still chittering to themselves as they hung onto my hair.

“Why don’t you two go join her?” I pulled Garbage Blossom free of my hair and reached around to try and grab Leaf. Neither seemed happy about my request, but after a few moments of pulling them away from me they both joined Crusty. None of them went lower than Crusty had been.

In my years of dealing with faeries, I’d learned it was always better to wait until they were ready to tell you what they felt you needed to know. Asking them what was going on could be confusing or worse. But at the same time, waiting around a suddenly surfacing corpse in the jungle wasn’t a grand idea either.

I moved toward the body, pulling back when all three zipped in front of me and fluttered their wings to push me back.

“What?” I let a bit of irritation slip into my voice.

“No going near very dead, very dead is protected.” Garbage took charge, folding her arms as if she was scolding a young child. “Protection is trap.” As if that said it all. Faery was a complex and twisted language that no other species could speak. Unfortunately many of their concepts and words didn’t make the leap to the common language.

“What kind of trap, Garbage? Will we explode?”

The other two giggled, but Garbage frowned and folded her arms tighter. “No being silly, protection traps make trouble. No boom.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. After all I’d been through in the last few days I really didn’t need to be playing ‘guess the fatal trap’ with a four-inch-tall faery.

“What is the trap, Garbage?” I opened my eyes to find a tiny orange head inches in front of my nose. She pulled back when I opened my eyes, but not far.

“Is trap to catch stupid people, stupid animals. You touch body, go through trap lining, trap grabs you.” She shrugged her tiny overall-clad shoulders. “You very dead too.”

I wasn’t going to get anywhere trying for more details, and if Garbage said it was something that could kill us, I had to believe her. As close as any of them could be, Garbage was the brains of the bunch. But even my little party animal Crusty stayed hovering well above the body.

Time to clear out. “I want you three to remember as much as you can about the body. Everything you can, right?” The faeries had good, albeit short term, memories. At least when they were sober. “We need to tell Covey, but you have to remember it all.”

Garbage gave me a serious nod, satisfied that I wasn’t going to run forward into the trap. Then all three did elaborate fly-bys over the body. After a few minutes they came back, but didn’t slam into me this time.

“Is good, we go now,” Crusty chirped as she drifted down to my shoulder.

They stayed quiet the rest of the way out, which fortunately wasn’t nearly as far away as I’d feared. I thought about asking the faeries if they’d seen Marcos, but I needed them to focus on that body long enough to talk to Covey. Maybe I’d ask Karys about him. She knew most all of the handsome men around town.

I’d never been this far east in the jungle before, but coming out I recognized Mhegen’s tannery so I had a good idea where I was. Thank the gods and goddesses that Mhegen was fastidious about her odor spells—I only saw the tannery, I didn’t smell it.

My stomach took that moment to remind me it hadn’t had breakfast, nor for that matter the previous day’s dinner or lunch.

The distraction about my stomach’s empty condition almost cost me my little assistants. I looked up just as Crusty began to lift off my shoulder, her tiny golden eyes locked onto something in the alley next to the tannery. Grabbing her, I cocked my head and gave her my best glare. With a smile only the truly deranged or very young can get away with she patted my arm and settled down. The other two hadn’t noticed.

My stomach rumbled again and I picked up my pace. Covey’s home wasn’t far from here, but if I didn’t get food soon I’d be snacking on the faeries.

Covey wasn’t an early riser, this time of year her people didn’t become really active until mid-day. But she had food in her kitchen, and enough spells in the place to keep it all fresh.

I could get breakfast off Covey, then she’d make sense of the faeries’ babbling. Perfect.

Reality, as usual, let me down.

“You want me to do what? And just where have you been? I’ve been trying to find you for days.” Covey’s normally sleek and impeccably neat black hair looked like she’d been stuck in the middle of a wizards’ brawl. A bad wizards’ brawl. I didn’t even know you could get hair to do that. She squinted at me through a crack in her inner eyelid. She hadn’t even bothered to draw both eyelids up. Didn’t know she could do that either.

“I was hoping you could make us some breakfast while the faeries tell you about what we found.” I held up Crusty who chirped at Covey. Crusty was her favorite for reasons I’d never been able to understand. “It will be worth it, I promise. Another mystery.”

Covey smiled at Crusty, actually letting both eyelids drift completely open. But she still leaned against the doorframe. “Come in, but you’re making breakfast. Do we need a spell canister?”

I was just stepping past her when her question hit me. Spell canisters were extremely pricey items. And while Covey did live higher up the food chain than me, she wasn’t at that level. The canister could hold all of the information the faeries could feed it. No long taking of notes, well, until Covey broke down and opened the canister anyway. Eventually she’d need to transfer the information out of the canister and into written form. But it could be stored indefinitely.

She quickly shut the door behind me, prodding us toward her small kitchen. “I borrowed it from the university, no you never mind why.”

I almost laughed at her slipping into pidgin. Her native land spoke common, but with an odd dialect. She really wasn’t awake if she’d slipped into that. I decided best not to comment. Never a good idea to poke fun of friends you needed favors from.

“If you have it, it’d be a good idea to use it. I’m not sure how long the girls can hold their information.” I left the faeries in the entrance to the kitchen and stumbled around for something to make. I rarely cooked, but I was so hungry at this point anything sounded good. And if Covey couldn’t eat it that was her fault for being foolish enough to suggest I cook.

While I fussed with some giant grillion eggs, I briefly told Covey what had been happening the last two days and what I’d found in the jungle. I carefully avoided mentioning what happened with Alric and the whisky. In my mind that was far too messed up of an incident to discuss, even with my best friend. Besides, it had nothing to do with the current situation. I also avoided Marcos as a subject.

She clearly wanted to ask me questions, but needed to supervise the faeries with the spell canister. They finished about the same time I came out with two plates of eggs and a bowl of goat’s milk for the faeries.

Covey was still listening to the last words echo into the canister when I put the plate down. She had her fork halfway to her mouth when she froze. “These eggs are gray.”

I had just shoveled a huge forkful into my mouth, I swallowed quickly. “Sometimes they just turn out that way.”

“No, eggs shouldn’t be gray.” She peered at me as I blissfully crammed more into my mouth, then shook her head and slid her plate next to me. “I don’t even want to know what you did to make them gray. If you promise never to tell me, I’ll give you mine.”

I nodded but kept eating.

“We have to tell the guardsmen.” She leaned back with a cup of tea that I’d managed not to turn gray.

I knew she’d say that. One problem with her over Harlan, she had more ethics.

“Maybe they’ll find it on their own?” Having finished the last of my eggs, I switched to her untouched plate. “I don’t really want to be associated with another dead body, thank you.”

She ran her fingers through her hair, but it barely moved. “I hadn’t thought of that. But surely you wouldn’t be held responsible. That giant was killed at least a year ago.”

“Right, he was killed suspiciously while working for the patron who hired me, after the giant’s disappearance.” I let some tea slide down to compact the eggs, then returned to shoveling.

“But…maybe you’re right.” She leaned back and sipped her tea in thought until I prompted her. I’d sort of hoped she’d argue a bit more. Her giving in meant I was probably right.

I shoved the near empty second plate away. “So what do we know?”

Covey got up and poured more tea for both of us, but I wasn’t sure if she was doing it to avoid looking at me, or because she needed more tea.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was looking for you because I’d heard about the murder. And I hadn’t been able to tell anything about the guy who stole the scroll.”

I smacked my head. I’d forgotten about the scroll. Alric may have even had it in that cave room he was hiding in.

“What? Did you find it?”

I winced. “No, I forgot about it. But I had reason with all that went on. I just realized that it could have been in the room Alric locked me in last night.”

The minute the words were out of my mouth I realized I’d screwed up. My brain seemed to be fading fast, probably a combination of the last few days and the whisky.

“Locked you up? You never said anything about locking you up.”

I dropped my face into my hands. No one to blame but myself. The only way to lie to Covey was by omission. If she knew something was up, all bets were off.

“No I didn’t,” I said. I tried to think of a cover story, but focusing wasn’t easy right now. “Fine. When he sort of rescued me, I was drowning and freezing, so against my request, he forced some whisky down me.”

“You can’t drink whisky—”

“I know. You know. And now, Alric knows. The hard way.”

“What did you do to him?” The look on her face spoke volumes of her opinion of me when I was drinking whisky. And they weren’t nice books.

“I don’t remember it well, but I got a bit aggressive. Sexually aggressive. I’m stronger than I thought, and he freaked out. Locked me up in the room and spent the night outside of it.”

Covey looked at me for a few moments, then burst out laughing. Not a sympathetic laugh, but a big, raucous, in-your-face laugh.

She finally stopped when someone pounded on her door.

“Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

I stewed and finished my tea. Nice friends I had: one sends a gigolo to rescue me, the other laughs at my non-self-inflicted drunken exploits.

Covey came back a moment later, her laughter replaced by a curious scowl.

“Didn’t you say the ruins were closed, and looked like they would be for a while?”

“Yes, they had a fence, and the main dig site was covered in non-regulation equipment, why?”

Covey jerked her thumb back at the door. “Harlan sent a runner looking for you. The ruins are open, and they’re allowing diggers back in starting tomorrow.”