The Glass Gargoyle (The Lost Ancients Book 1) Page 3

  “Testy, testy!” Harlan twitched a feline nose at me. “Karys said you’d left the Dewdrop with a handsome man in tow. Thought perhaps…?” He took a quick sip of his drink, “Or not. Never mind that then, shall we?”

  I sighed and ran my hands across my face. Ever since my unlamented ex-boyfriend had taken off for parts unknown seven months ago, it seemed like all my nearest and dearest were looking for me to hook up. It was starting to get on my nerves.

  “The meeting. What did I miss at the archeologists’ meeting?” I don’t know if it was me, or the people I associated with who were getting stupider.

  “Hmmph.” Harlan waggled a stumpy, clawed finger at me. “No sense of theatrics, that’s your problem.” A low purr rumbled as he settled back further on the sofa. “The interesting bits came after the official meeting, you see. Kerling, Mystral, Lafida, and I were lingering as we do. Any rate, there’s a reason patrons aren’t offering you work.”

  I held my tongue while he took a slow lapping sip of his lemonade. I let go of it when he looked ready to take another sip. “Well? Spit it out!” It had been two months since my last patron died. Perallan hadn’t been the best patron, but he stayed out of my way, paid decently for anything I brought in, and managed to get fair commissions for me. Right up until his sudden death.

  Harlan purred. “No one is going in the ruins right now. Even my patroness has been cut off. It happened subtly during the week, a few postponements of approvals, and drawn-out examinations of diggers’ papers. Now I mean us old-time diggers, folks who have been doing this since the High Queen was a kitten; they were pulling everyone in. Then yesterday it was announced that no digs were to take place. Something about a disease, or some such hockitymuck. They are up to something, I tell you.”

  “Is that it? An illness and you think there’s a conspiracy? Come on, Harlan. There have been outbreaks before.” And with some gruesome outcomes too. I shivered thinking about the last big one. It was about ten years ago; I’d been in town just a short while. A new tower had been found by a novice digger— unfortunately it had been booby trapped by the last owner. Over seventy-five people died slow painful deaths before the magehealers could cleanse the place. The ruins were mostly the work of one people, we called them elves, but there was no proof that’s who they were. They’d vanished nigh on 1300 years ago, and were far beyond any magic users around today. But there were hints there was another set of ruins below them, ones far more ancient.

  While I was interested in the ruins of the elves, I was fascinated by anything that may have come from those unnamed ancients before them. I had memories of wanting to find the missing people—ancient or elven—from when I was a child. Being excessively curious about everything just made that a bit of an obsession. Unfortunately, one needed a patron to dig in the ruins. Some towns were becoming more modern in their thinking and allowing diggers to get their own commissions for dig sites. But Beccia was fairly new in the ruins game, less than one-hundred years, and the site of what could be the largest ruins known. The rich folks who lived high on The Hill wanted to maintain control of anything and everything found. No patron, no digging.

  Harlan continued to look at me and nodded slowly. Thank the goddess I’d banned his pipe years ago, or he’d be pulling that nasty thing out now.

  “That’s what they want you to think.”

  “You’ve convinced yourself there’s a conspiracy in every blasted corner.” He looked to cut me off, so I rushed on. “Harlan, last year you were certain that the trash was being stolen by little green men.”

  “It was!” The fur ruff on the back of his neck stood up in indignation. “I was completely vindicated on that.”

  “They’d hired a gremlin trash crew, Harlan. Of course they—” My observation was cut off by a pounding at my door, a low pounding. The kind of pounding done by my three-foot-seven landlady. Funny, even Crusty never wanted to answer the door when she knocked. “Oh crap.” She’d threatened to throw me to the curb if the rent money didn't come in today.

  “I’m coming,” I said as I detoured to my room and grabbed the money out of my secret drawer. With a grimace, I swung open the door. “Why, Lady Nirtha, how nice of you to visit.”

  What appeared to be a giant fuzz bunny rolled into the room. I’d given up trying to figure out Nirtha’s ancestry years ago. Whatever many races she descended from, they were all evil.

  The fuzz bunny halted as soon as she saw Harlan. I didn’t know if it was a racial thing, but Nirtha hated Harlan with a passion. Actually she feared him, but let it rise to the surface as hate.

  “Don’t you try and sweet talk me, digger girl.” She whirled so that she couldn’t see Harlan which was probably better for her mental state. “I gave you until today. Where is my money?”

  I made a show of looking at the ground, letting her think that she had me on my way out. I held it for as long as I felt safe, then looked up. I wisely kept my grin in check. I could beat Nirtha in a fair fight, but she wasn’t the type to fight fair. “Here ya go.”

  I laid the freshly earned coins in her grubby tiny paw, then stepped back. Money was something Nirtha was extremely fond of. It wasn’t a good idea to get too close to her when she counted it.

  “Where’s the rest?”

  “What rest? That’s three months’ rent there. You can’t bugger me again until spring.” What game was she playing? She was a nasty little thing, but had been painfully honest about cash up until now.

  A wracking, grating noise filled the room until I thought for certain the walls were going to cave in. But it was Nirtha. Laughing. I’d lived here almost seven years, and I had gratefully been spared that sound. Until now.

  “Ah! Haven’t read that fine contract I had you sign last year, have ya?” She launched another volley of cackles. “If you be late, you have to pay extra. You have another two weeks to produce more.”

  “What are you talking about? You never changed anything…” As we’d been speaking, Harlan had rummaged through a pile of papers near my favorite chair. It amazed me how he could move so fast when looking for something small. Which was one of the reasons he was the best archeologist in the four kingdoms. Being naturally nosy made him better at it.

  He had a familiar-looking contract in his hand and was reading it when I stopped speaking. The contract. But certainly I would have noticed a change? Harlan put down the paper and shook his head. I hadn’t read the damn thing.

  “I’ll get you the money.” Diplomacy over, I started corralling her toward the door.

  She cackled some more, then bowed toward Harlan and flounced out the door.

  “I’ve told you before that not reading details would hurt you.” Chatalings didn’t have the right teeth for making tsking sounds, but that didn’t stop Harlan from trying.

  I rested my forehead against the closed door. I hadn’t even had breakfast yet, and had already been accosted and annoyed repeatedly. And as much as I adored Harlan, he wasn’t helping. Three overall-clad faeries came whooping into the room, bouncing on Harlan’s soft belly with giggles.

  I needed time and silence to work on a plan. “Harlan, how would you like to do the girls and me a huge favor?” I rushed on before he could respond. “Since, as you said yourself, no one can go out digging now, how about you take the girls out for a visit? Somewhere. Anywhere. All day if need be.”

  The faeries weren’t even listening to me as they were busy gorging themselves on bits of sweets they’d found in his vest pockets. Harlan looked ready to debate my request, but something must have shown on my face.

  “Aye, that might be a nice thing. Keep my mind off the lack of work.” He carefully lifted the faeries up to eye level, coughing to get their sugar-riddled attention. “What of it, girls? Want to spend the day with Uncle Harlan?”

  All three screeched, then zipped toward the door. Luckily I was still standing there or Garbage would have been an orange splat on the wood. I got the door open a second before she hit it.

  “T
hanks, Harlan.”

  He chortled and gave me a chuck under the chin as he followed the three blurs of color out. “Not a problem, my girl. And don’t you worry, something will come up. It always does.”

  I hoped he was right.

  Chapter 3

  I let myself slide against the back of the door after the girls and Harlan left. There had been too much action for this early in the morning. And way too many damn people in my house. All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed and stay there until nightfall. I even let myself entertain that lovely thought for a few minutes before reality crept back in.

  I needed a job. I needed a patron. I needed to find out what was going on at the ruins that had stopped all the digging. Despite what I told Harlan, I did think it sounded suspicious, but admitting that would have launched a full-scale chataling attack. He’d spend hours planning, bugging people to join him, then finally annoying folks to death. And he probably wouldn’t find anything. There was a chance I could find something, being more naturally prone to legally questionable activities than the far more forthright Harlan.

  Last, but not least, I needed to find out what Alric had been up to. Okay I didn’t need to, but I did want to know what he’d used on my faeries. I’d never seen anything like it, and that made me curious. If there was something interesting that I didn’t know, I needed to find out. Besides, Alric was annoying, but he was interesting. I could almost hear my father chuckling about falling to my doom because of my curiosity. It had been an ongoing thing when I was growing up.

  With a heavy sigh, I pushed myself away from the wall and shuffled off to my bedroom. I needed to be logical and sensible. Out of all the things I needed to do today, finding out about Alric’s mystery goo was positively the last on the list.

  So of course that’s where I was going to start.

  Dark clouds hung over the city like a drunkard’s belly and a chill wind sliced through everything. I pulled up the hood on my cloak with a sigh. As a general rule I wasn’t fond of cloaks and this heavy tapestry one least of all. They always smacked a bit too much of desperate pretentiousness. But it was cold, there might be rain, and I didn’t have anything else, having ended up with goo from the faeries’ wings all over my jacket. I kept my head down as I made my way to the university. The way my luck was going today I didn’t want to be recognized by anyone.

  Garean University was only a few blocks from my house. It was built eighty years ago during the first “ruins” craze. Those had been small ruins compared to the monster we were working on now. The ones of eighty years ago were an outpost of some kind, enough to start the trend of elven collections, but not enough to keep it going. The university came in at the height of the craze, academics having the ability to drag out interest in a subject long after normal folks have moved on. They’d managed to ride the residuals from those early findings until five years ago when the larger ruins were found. The original find was a few houses—the monster one was an entire city. All completely swallowed up and buried by the gargantuan jungle that covered the land to the south. Trees around the ruins were wider around than entire houses in the city, and their roots were thick and crawled above ground as if waiting for an unwitting passerby to stumble on them.

  One of the few folks I called friend was a happy beneficiary of the university’s ability to milk the ruins for funding. Covey was a trellian, but usually kept her slightly reptilian appearance and abilities hidden. Aside from her height and strength anyway—modern trellians were descended from some very strong and war-like giant reptiles that almost destroyed themselves hundreds of years ago.

  She and I had met when I first moved to Beccia fifteen years ago. I had recently lost my parents in a swamp boat accident, and had no other family. I knew no one in Beccia, or anywhere else really, I just knew I needed to get out of my home town, and wanted to be a digger. I had grown up wanting to look for the lost races. The sudden loss of my parents sent me south to find a way to do that. I was targeted by a pickpocket my first day in the city. Covey was on a lunch break in a nearby park, saw the whole thing, chased the bastard down, and got my wallet back. Simply because she wanted to see if she could catch him. Not that Covey wasn’t a great person, mind you, she was. But her primary motivation for doing anything was to see if she could.

  There weren’t many students on campus, this being the second week of their three-week winter break. I actually liked the university when the students weren’t there. They seemed to get in my way the rest of the time. As Covey was fond of pointing out whenever I’d start one of my anti-student tirades, without them there wouldn’t be a university. In theory anyway. I always pointed out that the university was into so many things by this point that did they really need rich kids cluttering up the halls?

  The outer corridors were darkened by the rich bastardization of an elven arch. That was one thing that annoyed me even more than the students, the liberty the architects took in some areas with the elven buildings. To make them seem more mysterious, they made many things dark and heavy. In reality, the structures I’d seen so far were graceful and light. I spared a glare for the fake elven work, then continued down to Covey’s office.

  I froze when I realized the door was ajar. This being winter, and Covey having an office that opened to an outer courtyard, an open door could only spell trouble. Like all reptilians, trellians had a fondness for warmth. I had picked this time of morning because she was usually in her office. Had she stepped out and someone broken in?

  From the doorway, I peeked in to see the big desk. Leaning a bit more forward brought me the view of her long skinny legs jutting out awkwardly on the floor behind the desk.

  They weren’t moving.

  I grabbed both my stun cuffs and my sting wand— I’m not licensed to carry more advanced magical weapons—and crept into the doorway. I wasn’t a fighter, but I couldn’t let my best friend lay there possibly bleeding to death.

  Covey still hadn’t moved, or at least her legs hadn’t since that was all I could see. I tried to see behind the door and still watch Covey at the same time.

  Didn’t work.

  A roughly man-shaped shadow rushed me as my glance lingered a bit too long on Covey’s still legs. Good thing the person only wanted out of the room and not something more. He knocked me down without a “by your leave” and vanished. I got to my feet, but there was no one down the hallway. I turned back to my friend and let out a sigh of relief when I saw no blood around her.

  “Covey? Wake up.”

  Once I got a good look at her I realized the intruder must have used a sleep spell on her. He’d wanted her out of the way but not permanently. The panicked feeling in my throat loosened a bit.

  I checked her pulse. Slow as slime falling off a toad, but steady. Whatever spell he’d used, it might take a while for her to wake up. I didn’t want to wait.

  I rummaged through the supplies in her desk but came up empty.

  “You should keep your anti-spell supplies more handy,” I told my unconscious friend as I ransacked a few more cabinets. Of course the neat little box with the anti-spell shots was in the last one I checked. Maybe the mess I made would convince her to store them where I could find them next time.

  Pulling her chair cushion down and under her head, I opened the spell wrapper and injected her.

  Her eyelids moved rapidly, as if fighting being taken out of her slumber. Eventually her long arms waved up and smacked the air. They’d almost got me but I was expecting it. Taking someone out of a spell sleep wasn’t easy.

  Holding her still twitching limbs, I called to her.

  “Covey. Covey, you damn old bat, wake up.”

  She flailed around some more, trying to hit something to my left.

  “It’s me. Open your eyes.” I shook her arms.

  She didn’t open her eyes but muttered under her breath.

  “Are you ok?” Maybe he’d hit her too, she usually came out of spells fast. “Come on—”

  “I said, I’m not a
bat.” One golden eye peered at me as she frowned and pulled herself upright. She teetered a bit, but made it back into her chair.

  “What the hell happened?” I hadn’t been able to tell if the intruder had taken anything.

  “I have no idea.” Her scowl took up her entire sharp face as she glanced around the room looking for clues. “I came back in after a meeting and surprised some felon. He was ransacking my research files.” Her primitive trellian ancestors showed themselves in that moment; she looked like she wanted to break a few dozen bones.

  “To be completely honest I’m not sure what he was after or even if it was a he. My assumption is based on the individual’s size and movements—” Covey was slipping into professor speak, never a good sign.

  “Are you working on anything anyone would want?” I cut her off. If she started speculating I’d get nothing useful out of her for a week.

  The glare she threw my way warned me the breaking of bones might be aimed in my direction. She was sure everyone was after her finds—I continually reminded her no one outside of the university cared.

  “You know what I mean. Anyone outside of academia. Any long-lost high elven secrets?”

  Covey frowned and folded her arms. “I have found a number of interesting facts, but there was nothing that an outsider would go after.” The emphasis she put on the word outsider almost made me feel unclean. She started picking up the rest of the room and muttering to herself.

  I decided to help just to get my ass out of that chair. Besides, I had sort of contributed to the mess when I was looking for the sleep spell antidote.

  Nothing appeared broken, but whether anything had been taken only Covey could tell. I bent down to pick up one of her scrolls. She might not like to call the race that left them elven—she personally didn’t believe in the mythological beings of eons past—but she was fascinated by their writings. So far no one had been able to read them, so Covey was determined to be the first.