The Sapphire Manticore (The Lost Ancients Book 4) Read online

The laugh that escaped got me a few odd looks from the other knights, but Flarinen was too annoyed at the guards he was talking with to notice. Harlan’s knots were legend in the ruins of Beccia. We often had to rely on rope ladders to descend to some of the deeper digs, and Harlan’s knots always held. Often long after they were supposed to, and against the wishes of the ladder owners.

  “I will need the pri—the guests Alric and Taryn to follow us, the rest of you need to wait until we have a place for you to stay.” Flarinen covered well after avoiding the word ‘prisoners’. “We are not used to visitors in our land. At least not voluntary ones.” Unfortunately, he had our packs with him now. The only one I didn’t see was the one with the chest—hopefully Alric had been able to hide that one in Qianru’s carriage.

  “Oh, they must stay with me. Taryn and her high lord companion as well once they finish up whatever they are doing here.” Qianru had grown bored and was making ready to depart. “I have more than enough room.” She nudged her driver. “I’m sure they want to stay here for a bit, but I am simply exhausted and must relax. Give their driver directions.” She waved a benediction over us. “I will have quarters and refreshments awaiting you all.” Then she climbed inside and closed the door.

  “Lord Alricianel Lis Treann Flairn Delpina and Taryn St. Giles, you are commanded to enter the council chambers.” The guard who spoke was not one of Flarinen’s men, nor did he appear to be a knight. He was garbed resplendently in emerald and silver armor that managed to look almost like rich fabric.

  I said goodbye to my friends, not wanting to risk an increase in the surrounding hostile looks by dallying. Harlan and Covey both gave quick nods and I knew they’d make sure the girls stayed safe. And Bunky, if he showed up.

  As we walked up the long stairs, I focused on the majestic armor, but as we got closer, it was clear, that while amazing, the metal was thin and finely made, but unless there was a lot of magic behind it, it was not capable of slowing down any type of blade.

  That didn’t reduce the very impressive stance of both guards. I hadn’t noticed at first, as her hair was pulled back, but the second guard was a female.

  Good to know there was equality among the elves. As long as you were an elf at least. I definitely got the feeling that some of the elves around us felt the desperate need to go bathe just from seeing so many of us non-elves together.

  The gate was impressive as hell and even if they locked me up, it was worth it to see these doors up close. I knew they couldn’t be from before the Breaking. Alric had told me the elves who survived barely got out with their lives and what little they could carry. Nothing big was saved. But it looked like it could have come from the ruins back in Beccia.

  It was easily twice as tall as myself, probably closer to three times, and each door was wider than I could reach across. Unlike the building, the gate was a deep, shimmering green. It was made of layers of thin metal of slightly different shades, all cut and crafted over each other to provide a labyrinth of detail everywhere you looked. I reached out to touch it but found my hand frozen a few inches away.

  It wasn’t any of the people around me, it was the gate itself. Even with my relatively recent change from magic sink to magic user, I hadn’t become that sensitive to magic. Oh, I could feel it usually, but quite a bit after Alric would have noticed it. Nevertheless, this I could feel. The layers of metal were echoed by layers of spells. Some so old they were in place probably years before Alric’s parents were born.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Alric’s voice next to my ear caused me to jump.

  Then I noticed I’d actually stopped walking and everyone was looking at me. I nodded and stepped forward.

  The council chambers were even bigger than I’d expected. Completely round and easily four stories high, with four stairwells drifting down along the round walls among enormous hanging works of art. The floor was made of mosaics, showing different images on the edges, possibly historical from my quick look as we walked forward, but in the center was the same extended arm sun as I’d seen from the mountain above the city. The Shimmering Dewdrop could fit in here five times over.

  Benches lined the walls, and small groups of elves spoke in hushed tones. Except for the phalanx of five heading toward us.

  “Is this the one who believes she called a spirit sword, my son?” I’d no idea what religious elves looked like, but something about these five told me I was about to find out.

  Flarinen had been off to the side, I assumed to make sure Alric and I didn’t make a run for it. He came toward us as the overdressed and haughty elves stopped in front of me.

  “I saw it when we arrived to obtain the prisoner. She already had it in her possession. It has been called at least two other times that I have seen.” He gave a small nod. “It is a spirit sword and it is responding to her, your piousness.”

  I really needed to find out about their religion while I was here. There’d been little evidence of any organized religions in the ruins back in Beccia.

  The lead religious elf, dressed with enough layers to handle the freezing cold of the northern realms, took a step forward, looked me slowly up and down, pushed back my hair to see my ears, then stepped back.

  “Are you perchance part elf? One of our lost half-breeds from out in the wilds?” His tone managed to be sympathetic and condescending in exactly the same measure. It was a handy skill to have.

  “Nope. Human, with half-dryad on my mom’s side.” I held myself up proudly. Granted, the dryad bit didn’t really prove that handy, but still, I was proud of it.

  “Oh, really?” His tone slipped a bit more into condescending and he took a tiny step back. “Then I am afraid to tell you, Captain Flarinen, that you have been well and truly tricked. I assure you, there is no way that the spirits behind the goddess of the swords would send one of their own to a…non-elf.”

  I really needed to learn that. The amount of derision he fit into ‘non-elf’ without sounding truly vile was amazing.

  “I respectfully re-state my assertion, it was a spirit sword.” Flarinen was starting to turn red. Not a lot, but he was so fair that it didn’t take much.

  All five religious leaders nodded slowly as if his words had great weight. A little bit of muttering was heard from them but since they didn’t turn toward each other while doing it, it was more like a collection of five old elves talking to themselves at once.

  The leader stepped forward again and held out his hand.

  “Child, it has been determined that you have fooled our good captain. The magic of the outer world in you is strange, but it is there nonetheless. It is easy for one such as you to fool those of lesser observational skills.”

  Flarinen was still in my range of sight, and his blush went from pink to ruby.

  I tried staring down the leader but couldn’t hold it. “I don’t have control of when it appears. The first time was in a fight for my life and it was just there. It’s not like I can will it—”

  I stopped arguing when the hand I was waving about suddenly had my sword in it. Luckily I was far enough away that no one was injured from my flinging.

  “Okay, like that. It showed up on its own.” I held the sword out for inspection, ignoring the narrowed eyes and increased mutterings coming from the religious leaders. Then the sword vanished.

  “And that. I had nothing to do with it coming or going.”

  A raised voice drew my attention, mostly because there was something about the grandeur of the place that made you want to speak softly.

  A small group of elves near the entrance seemed to have a more animated member. He wasn’t yelling, but his voice would raise periodically in seemingly no pattern. He was stalking around the group as he spoke and I finally got a good look at him

  The elf was crazed, even I could tell that, although most of the people around him were trying to ignore it. His hair was longer than Alric’s on one side, a raven black wave that almost hit his hip, the other side was bald. His face was smooth, but the sid
e with the missing hair was almost too smooth, as if it wasn’t real. The skin where his hair should be on that side was the same. He’d been horribly injured at some point and even all of the elven magic in this enclave hadn’t been able to completely repair the damage.

  His eyes gave him away—too much white showed—and they had a skittish quality. He looked around the room rapidly, not seeing anything, but trying to see everything even as he talked to his companions. His hands twitched, echoing the movement of his eyes.

  Then he saw Alric.

  The slight semblance of normalcy he was trying to project vanished. He growled and hands curled into fists as he shoved the elf in front of him aside and ran toward Alric.

  I was too far away to do anything but yell, which really upset the religious leaders trying to explain to me why I couldn’t have possibly called a spirit sword. In fact they all looked ready to flee.

  Alric looked up as the elf slammed into him and started pounding on him. Alric was at the disadvantage of surprise, so the other man got a few punches in before Alric could fight back.

  I expected the guards in the area to do something but they all held back.

  “You bastard! You killed them all!” The man was now drooling as he yelled, but at least he was yelling words instead of animal sounds. “You and your people attacked us, tortured us. Just to get that damn gargoyle back!”

  I pushed the nearest guard aside and ran to the fighting men. I wasn’t sure what I should do, here in the elven high council chambers and all. I seriously doubted Orenda’s trick with the ears would work with a mad man, not to mention I wasn’t nearly as fast as she was.

  Before I could do anything, Alric scrambled around his attacker, his boots skidding on the polished floor, and he locked him in a chokehold.

  “Padraig, I didn’t attack any of you. It wasn’t me.” Alric grunted as Padraig tried to elbow him in the gut. Alric also squeezed his neck a bit tighter.

  “You’ll have to kill me too. I begged you to spare Gastia—she was my wife! You laughed and killed her in front of me.”

  Alric almost buckled at that. He obviously knew this man and his wife. He clenched his jaw and tightened his hold on the other man’s neck. “It wasn’t me.” His voice was low as Padraig lost consciousness and he let him slide to the ground.

  I’d never seen Alric cry, but he wiped something away from his eyes as he rose to his feet. He was also pale and shaking. Until he saw Flarinen.

  “You bastard. You didn’t tell me who was killed. Padraig, Gastia, and I grew up with you.” He didn’t move closer but the guards who had been ignoring the fight before were now suddenly extremely attentive.

  Flarinen looked ready to fire off a retort, and I think had this happened a few weeks ago he would have shredded Alric. However, he didn’t seem as sure of Alric’s guilt now as he’d been then. He stayed silent.

  “You killed them, why should he have to say their names?” The injured, and formerly smoking, knight yelled from where he was being looked at by healers.

  “He was with me. With my entire company.” Locksead’s voice cut in.

  Obviously Locksead had grown tired of waiting. He stood at the entrance to the chamber with his arms crossed and a scowl aimed at the elf blocking him.

  “Take the word of a thief? About a thief? Rot in hell, human.” The knight tried to get off the bench the healers had him on, but they refused to let him up.

  “Captain Flarinen, is this appropriate behavior for your men?” The new voice came drifting down from the glass staircase next to us. Followed by a very stern-looking female elf. Her white hair was balanced in an elaborate confection on top of her head, but instead of looking beautiful it made her look more severe. She had an extremely delicate marking on her right cheek, an echo of the one both Alric and Flarinen had but far finer.

  Jovan had been the only old elf I’d seen, but this woman was easily his contemporary.

  “No, Excellency, it is not.” Flarinen kept his voice low, but the knight shut up immediately.

  “I will not have this sort of behavior in the council chambers. Ever. By anyone.” Her ice blue eyes settled on Alric. “Is that understood?”

  Like a classroom of misbehaving little boys, Flarinen, Alric, and all of the guards nodded in unison.

  “Thank you. Now, will someone please pick up Padraig and take him back to his room?” She waited a beat until three of the guards darted forward and carried the unconscious man out and down a hall at the other end. “Very good. We have blood evidence of the attacker on the alchemists. I will have the healers compare that blood to that of Alric. We will resolve this now. I will not have any more issues. Either it is not him, in which case he is free to go, or it is, and he will hang.” She left in the silence that followed.

  Two healers came from a side room, and politely took Alric back with them, but not before I mouthed the words, “Who was that?” His response of “my grandmother” was disturbing enough to almost make me drop to the floor.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Crap. His own grandmother could be that cold? I had a feeling I was going to find out more than I ever wanted to know about Alric’s life while we were here. I hoped we both lived through it.

  I was suddenly very painfully aware that I was alone. In a giant room of elves who were not looking at me favorably. After his outburst, Locksead had been chased from the front gate, so I assumed my friends were all on their way to Qianru’s mansion.

  And I was left here waiting to see if the new love of my life was going to be hung by his grandmother.

  “Lock her up.”

  I’d completely forgotten about my little religious inquiry group until those rude and shocking words came from behind me.

  All five of the religious leaders, along with four guards wearing the green of the council chambers, marched up to me.

  “I haven’t done anything.” I could understand them wanting to find out why that damn sword kept coming to me. After all, I’d like to know that myself. However, locking me up seemed a bit extreme.

  “You have shown evidence of illegally and unethically calling a weapon reserved only for our highest of people. Since you are not an elf, nor even an elf half-breed, the assumption must be made that you are a thief of great power,” the leader of the religious gang said from a safe distance, as the guards marched forward with heavy manacles. “The inquisitor will need to speak to you when he returns.”

  I wasn’t a small woman, but the manacles looked big enough to drag me to the floor. Before I could complain, my arms were flung behind my back and those things slammed on them. They completely covered my hands, almost up to my elbows, but surprisingly were a lot lighter than they looked.

  “These will stop any magic from you. And any attempt to remove them will increase their weight until your limbs are crushed by them.” He delivered this extremely happy pronouncement with the same tone a normal person would wish you a pleasant morning. He didn’t even wait for me to respond, just motioned to the guards. “Take her to the tower.”

  Now, along with being fascinated by the ruins of these elves, even though the mystique of them was quickly fading, I loved their older towers when I could find them in the ruins. The ones that, before the soft ground and creeping gapen tree jungle had pulled them down, easily went far into the sky. So a little part of me was very excited about seeing one intact and whole. The rest of me was imagining spending the rest of a very short life trapped in a tower, forgotten by all.

  But neither side of my brain had much chance to think about things as I was grabbed on either arm by the very strong council guards and forced to march across the room and to another set of stairs. This one was made out of dark, polished wood. It was shorter than the one Alric’s grandmother had used, but there was a broad hall at its top that indicated the direction of the tower was far past the council chambers.

  As we marched toward my doom, I realized that aside from the front door, the stairwells were the only way in or out of the chambe
r. Interesting technique, but could be effective if attacked.

  I was right. The hall led away from the chamber below, quite a bit away. From the outside, the front of the council building looked large, but not this large. Elaborate works of art lined the walls. I tried stopping to look at them but my guards just lifted me up and kept walking. The one leading us didn’t even pause.

  Long and narrow, with no windows, the hall should have been dark, but an odd paint covered the curved ceiling and lent a subtle glow the entire way.

  My escorts wouldn’t let me stop to look at that either. Nor did they seem likely to answer questions.

  The hall ended abruptly with another landing. These stairs were far more elegant than any I’d seen in Beccia’s ruins, but still simple enough that they were clearly a service stairway. The narrow stairs curved, forcing my left-hand guard to drop behind us.

  Three flights later and my wonderment at the structure, the stairs, and the entire elven nation was pretty much at an end. Not to mention that the one guard who was holding me up was about a foot taller than me, so he was holding me at an awkward angle.

  Just when I was about to demand we stop and take a breather, the lead guard turned a sharp corner and shoved open a door.

  I paused, causing the guard behind me to push. Not hard, but enough to get me going. They probably thought I was balking at the whole tower prison thing, and they were partially right. I was also wondering if I was dreaming. The room itself would be thought of as a classic tower chamber—round, not very big, with two small windows that probably would come in handy to shoot arrows from in times of attack. A brief glance told me I would not be getting out that way. It was stocked with a cot, a small wardrobe, a pair of wooden chairs, a small table, and what looked like a small bathroom—that was a new addition judging by the work around the doorframe—but one I was very grateful for.

  They also had beautiful rugs on the hard stone floor, and three lovely tapestries on the stone walls. Even the cover on the cot looked like a work of art.