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“No.” He drifted back down to the bar with Alric and me again silently following behind.

“Foxy, maybe there was something that made her leave.” I had to give him some hope, even though it looked to me like she’d stayed long enough to get what she wanted, whatever that had been, then took off. She’d established that she had enough pieces of her tree’s heart to travel all of Beccia without consequence, who was to say she didn’t have enough to go even further? “Maybe her former master said he would hurt you if she didn’t leave?” He had his back to me and I shrugged at Alric. Foxy needed some good denial right now.

Alric nodded. “Why don’t you tell me about her master? Do we know where this person was from? Taryn told me about the zombie, but have there been any other threats?” Like a troll attacking then re-attacking as a zombie wasn’t threat enough. But I knew what he was looking for: we had no idea what Amara had been after aside from the supposed tree-parts. Coming to the Shimmering Dewdrop had saved her from the troll, but she couldn’t have known Glorinal would be able to stop him. Besides, if that had been the only reason, she should have taken off right after the zombie was sliced and diced by the barmaids.

“Nay, she didn’t want to speak of him. I think she came from the south though. Sometimes she’d sing in the kitchen and I recognized some of the songs from there. She knew artifacts though.” He nodded as a memory came to him. “Sometimes she’d be out here talking to the diggers about their finds.”

“Did she know Slim?” I was thinking about the horde of artifacts I’d seen at the bar. Foxy hadn’t seen them, or if he had he probably hadn’t registered what they were.

“Nay, she said she wouldn’t have no bother with a satyr. Guess they have a bad reputation in her homeland.”

They didn’t have a good one here either but I refrained from saying anything.

“She’s good people, Alric. She didn’t want to leave me, I know it.” Foxy looked up again and tears were streaming down his face. “Find her. Just find her.”

Alric patted him on the back. And I came up and hugged him. Or tried to. My arms could only reach part of the way around. “We’ll find her, I promise.”

Alric said the same, and then re-wrapped himself up. We had found out as much as we could about her disappearance, and we did need to find her. But I had a bad feeling there was way more going on with her story than just a lost love for Foxy.

Foxy nodded and followed us to the door. He took out a sign I’d never seen used before, and slid it outside as he let us out. It simply said “Closed”. I heard the door lock behind us as we left.

Only to open as we were about half a pub away. “Wait! Taryn!” I heard the pause as he almost said Alric. But he came up to us at what passed for a run for him. “I found this in another drawer she used. Not sure if it will help, but she had a few things like this. Take it if it will help.” He held out a piece of metal I was getting to know all too well—a square from a very large sarcophagus.

I quickly slipped it into my cloak. I needed to show the pieces I’d found in the Dodgy Codger to Alric as well, but not here. There were way too many people showing up with these sections. “Do you know where she got it?”

Foxy was already turning back toward his pub at my question, but turned his head over his shoulder. “No, it was something she brought with her from her home.” Then his shoulders slumped and he walked back to the Dewdrop.

“Was that what I thought it was?” Alric asked as we started walking back toward my home.

“Yup.” I looked around, but there were too many people around to show him it or the others I’d found. “And I hadn’t had a chance to tell you, but I found a stash of similar pieces in the Dodgy Codger too.”

“I need to see them, all of them.” He slowed a bit, but clearly something about our recent surplus of sarcophagus pieces had him worried.

We were almost to the door of my house when I heard the ear-splitting sound of faery war cries.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

At first I didn’t see anything, then a small cloud came zig-zagging directly at us from the general vicinity of the ruins. I was torn between wanting to run inside and lock the door against whatever madness the faeries were chasing my way, and seeing what they had found. Life with them was often like watching a carriage crash right before it happened. You knew you should look away, but you just couldn’t.

The girls, and about two dozen of their still wild cousins, were herding a crazily flying chimera our way. At least it I was hoping it was a chimera and not a sceanra anam. All I could tell for sure was it was black and trying to out-fly the faeries.

“Crap.” I was still debating going in and locking the door when Alric got to the door first. I was shocked at that, for about two seconds. That was how long it took him to unlock my door and wave in the faeries and their captive.

“What are you doing?” I ran into the house before he could lock me out. I didn’t think he’d do it, but he was shutting that door fast once the faeries and the buzzing chimera flew past him.

“They brought us something to work with, and the fewer people who see this the better.” He was right on that score, but I was still debating wanting the thing in my house.

Garbage Blossom flew up near my face. “We bring. You take. Is good.” Satisfied that she’d done her duty, she waved the wild faeries over to the girls’ castle.

The chimera hovered in the air, looking like a large, deranged flying goat. Unlike the previous ones I’d seen, this one had tiny wings that just accented its very round little body and really shouldn’t be able to keep it in the air. The head looked like a shiny, black goat, and it had the tail of a fish. One thing about who ever made these things, they were creative. Bizarre, but creative.

The creature had seemed upset about the faeries chasing it, but it was more the reaction of a farm animal being harassed by the farmer’s children. Unlike the sceanra anam, the faeries didn’t seem to have an adversarial relationship with the chimeras, even if they obviously had annoyed this one.

I had no idea what to do with it though.

“So, your people wanted a chimera. There ya go, take it to the homeland.” I waved toward the odd flying thing. As I did so, I smelled a nasty waft of something vile. Was that me? Ignoring the hovering chimera for a moment, I lifted open my jacket. Yup, the smell was me, or rather my shirt. That damn bottle I threw at Slim must have not been sealed properly. Obviously, Slim used cheap hooch even if it had been in an expensive bottle. “I’ll be right back.” I headed toward the bedroom and my bathroom sink. A soft buzzing told me the chimera was following me.

“Look, crazy-thing, you stay out here with Alric, okay?” It pulled back a bit, but kept following me. It even had little goat horns and a chin tuft. It was difficult to make out other markings since, like all of the chimeras I’d seen, it was black and shiny.

A weird buzzing in my head told me to touch it. I wasn’t even thinking as my hand went up and petted it. My first thought was that while it looked hard and shiny, but actually was weirdly soft. My second thought was slammed out of my head by a million images of places I’d never seen and people I’d never met. And creatures. All number of creatures flashing through my head. I screamed, which freaked out the chimera and made him buzz back into the living room, and then I collapsed in the middle of my hallway.

Alric must have been following us, because he was at my side almost at the same time my ass hit the rug.

“What happened?” He pulled me to my feet, but I found I simply couldn’t tell him about the images.

“That damn toy of yours scared me, that’s all.” I turned away and was in my room before he could respond.

I’d just finished pulling on a new tunic when I heard the front door slam. Alric was taking off? If he was stealing that chimera, I was going to hunt him down and turn him in to the guardsmen. Never mind that I had just told him to take it back to his people, I wanted to look at it first. Just probably not touch it again anytime soon.

I ran into the living room to find Alric reading a letter and the chimera hovering over his head.

“Is that for me?” Since there was no way anyone would know that Alric was here, I sort of made that assumption. Then grabbed it out of his hand.

“I was going to give it to you.” The words were contrite but the voice wasn’t. “The delivery boy said it was urgent and I didn’t know how long you were going to take.” In other words, he’d hoped to read it and re-fold it back into its envelope before I was any the wiser.

“You know why people don’t like you? You’re too sneaky.” I waved the envelope in his face then went to sit in my chair. I ignored the no longer smoking ruin that was once my new sofa. Harlan better replace it soon or there would be fur flying.

The outside of the envelope was addressed to me, but I didn’t recognize the writing. Nor the writing on the letter. I should have though. It was from Qianru. She hadn’t found my friend but was leaving with Jovan for an out of town emergency. She’d be gone at least a week and I was to consider it time off with pay.

I re-read that line at least five times. I’d had some decent patrons in the past but none of them gave me a paid vacation.

She was closing the site to any further digging for a while. During that time, the university wanted to examine the evidence of where the chimeras and sceanra anam had come out. There had been a rash of attacks in the outer edges of the city, and everyone in academia was charged with stopping them. Most likely Harlan and Covey’s Committee was at the middle of it.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit odd? Within an hour of you seeing her, she has an emergency and a bunch of academics want to shut down her dig site?” Alric asked as he took the letter out of my hand.

Alric was getting as paranoid as Harlan. I fiddled with the envelope. “Stranger things have happened. Especially when you’re around.” That mob of academics that had been in here easily could have branched out to wanting to find the source of the creatures. And if they had been able to get the Antiquities Commission behind them they could have done it.

He didn’t respond but re-read the letter. He was right that it was a little odd, but my life had been more than a little odd for a number of months now. If I was honest, it had probably been odd since the faeries came into my life, but I’d been able to stay in denial until a few months ago. I really missed denial.

The chimera buzzed my hair again, and I ducked. I really didn’t want a repeat of whatever happened before. Maybe they were memory vessels and if you touched them it all came out. They were constructs after all, creatures made by an insanely strong magic user for a reason. As usual, I was going to tell Alric more than I wanted to.

“Touch the chimera,” I told Alric.

He looked up from studying the letter. “What? Why?”

I waved the flying thing in his direction. “That thing is loaded with images of things I’ve never seen before. That’s what knocked me down in the hall.”

His frown changed instantly. Normal people would avoid getting knocked on their asses. Alric seemed to thrive on putting himself in situations that could end up that way. “Really?” He set the letter down and called the chimera over. It flew closer to him, but kept dodging whenever he tried to touch it. After a few very interesting-to-me-anyway minutes, he gave up and sat back down.

“Something not liking you? How surprising.” I’d been annoyed at Alric ever since I met him with a few small exceptions that blew up in my face each time. This time it seemed to have gotten worse the moment he started looking like his old self again. Clearly, there were some unresolved issues on my end.

“It’s a construct, quite possibly a thousand-year-old construct. Who knows what’s going on in its head?” The chimera buzzed close by him, but not enough for a touch, and came back to my side of the room.

“I’d say it’s just showing good taste.” I looked at the note again and doubt started poking its head around. “Do you think that something may have happened to Qianru?” She was more than a little crazy. And I was concerned about her trying to collect all of the known and unknown weapons of mass destruction around, but she was sort of my favorite patron. Had I been wrong about Amara actually being kidnapped and whoever grabbed her also taken Qianru and Jovan? And then took the time to write a note?

“Why are you shaking your head?” Alric was studiously ignoring the chimera who was now taking fly-bys near him, then racing off.

“Just ignoring some unlikely scenarios in my head. Do you think that the letter is right about the academics?”

Alric read it again, but the look on his face was probably the same as mine. No.

“That means whoever the letter writer is, be it Qianru or someone else, they want me to stay away from the dig site starting tomorrow. The site is remote enough compared to the others that a good-sized group could be in there and not even be noticed.”

“Like that mage and his guards.” Alric got to his feet. “Which means if we want to see what they are really looking for, we need to get there before they start.”

On one hand, this had been a crappy weekend, but on the other hand I now had a paid week off. I just wish I knew whether to be happy or scared about it.

“But what are we going to do with that?” I pointed to the chimera. The faeries and their wild kin were having some sort of party in the faeries’ castle. I could ask them to watch the chimera, but the odds weren’t good they’d do it for more than a minute or two after we left.

“Ask it to stay.” Alric’s voice was matter of fact as he started to wrap his cloak and fabrics around him.

I looked at the cheerfully buzzing goat-fish-flying thing then back at Alric. “What?” Covey would know for certain, but I was pretty sure only mages could control constructs.

“Ask it. I have my reasons, but I think it likes you. Constructs were rumored to have a fair amount of free will. So unless someone with power ordered them not to, and it’s very unlikely that anyone around here has that kind of power, it will do what it wants.”

The buzzing got a bit louder and the chimera flew a little closer to Alric as if in agreement.

“If I ask you, will you stay here?” I felt a bit daft talking to something that shouldn’t exist, had been buried under the ground for a thousand years, and wouldn’t really have a brain. I swore its buzzing took on a quizzical tone. But still seemed ready to follow me. “I want you to stay here. Don’t leave this house.” It buzzed around my head a few times then landed on my chair. “You understand you need to stay?”

It didn’t speak, but it gave a little nod. And the set of its goat-like face seemed very determined.

Alric was already by the door, and the faeries could come and go as they pleased. Judging by the raucous laughter in their castle they probably wouldn’t even notice if I was gone for hours.

I grabbed my gear satchel and added a few more snap glows. We couldn’t risk using full-sized glows since the ruins would be dark soon and any light would be seen for a distance even with the giant gapen trees. The full moon would help us see most things anyway. My stomach rumbled and I threw some bread and cheese into the satchel.

“Are we investigating or moving in?” Alric had been leaning against the door frame. Even in his wrapped-up state, I just knew the look on his face. I glared back.

“We’re doing this right.” I walked around him and grabbed a few more things: some thin rope and a small knife. “I know you just go all over the ruins night or day wreaking havoc, but some of us are professionals. We will find out what they are looking for, but I’m not compromising the dig site.”

“The last thing I’d want to compromise is the dig site.” With that, he turned and walked into the night.