Con & Conjure

Chapter 20

Where were a claw cracker and hot butter when you needed them?

I’d eaten crab. I loved crab. Now I faced the very real and immediate irony of a crab eating me—or at least pinching off my leg. I thought crab legs were delicious. I wondered in a moment of giddy panic if giant crabs felt the same way about people legs.

Years ago, I’d run into a werehound in a goblin prison. I was there as an unwanted visitor helping a valued guest leave. There was an explosion two cell blocks over, and the guards had run to put out the resulting fire. The explosion had been my doing; releasing a werehound to patrol in their absence had been the guards’.

I’d been expecting a werehound. One drugged treat and two minutes later, it’d been dozing like a puppy.

Right now, I didn’t think we had minutes, and I had no idea what the hell a giant crab ate. Though from the way its claws were clicking and clacking, I think it knew exactly what it wanted.

I’d be willing to bet those pincers weren’t its only weapon. Its shell had a dull metallic sheen, more like armor than anything else, and the shell’s edges looked razor sharp and were actually dripping with strands of green slime. Poisonous? Probably. I couldn’t imagine green slime being a good thing.

“Do crabs have ears?” Phaelan whispered.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

The eyestalks swiveled toward us. Apparently werecrabs did.

Yeah, I know, but at least werecrab sounded remotely dangerous, because being snipped into big-sized chunks by a mere crab, even a giant one, would be beyond embarrassing. I didn’t know if the thing was something else between sunup and sundown, and right now it didn’t matter.

Werecrab, it was.

Run away was my impulse, but it wasn’t an option, at least not with a hungry crustacean standing between us and what Phaelan’s blueprints said was freedom. One of us could distract the thing while the other darted around it. Problem was the crab’s shell with its dripping slime almost extended from one side of the corridor to the other. There was no room to get around it, and the only way we could distract it would result in one of us losing an arm or leg. I wasn’t eager to try either one, but the crab didn’t look inclined to go back where it came from, and as to us going back to where we came—

“Is there a way out behind us?” I asked.

“Would I still be here if there was?” Phaelan was bouncing on the balls of his feet, ready to move in any direction, including up. “What are you waiting for? Do your thing.”

“My thing?”

Phaelan wiggled his fingers in the air. “Magic. You can move things. Move that.”

“Don’t know if I can.”

“What do you mean you don’t—”

“Magic doesn’t always work on magic.”

“It ain’t magic; it’s a crab.”

“If it’s a construct, anything I do won’t dest—”

“What the hell’s a—”

“It means it doesn’t really exist. Looks real, feels real, but ain’t real.” My voice was edging toward panic, and the rest of me wasn’t far behind.

“Well, that construct wants to take a bite out of my leg. That real enough for you?”

My borderline anxiety attack wasn’t just because my only way out of this hellhole was blocked by a werecrab. My magic could tell me if the werecrab was real or not. The real problem was that I couldn’t tell.

My heart pounded absurdly loud in my ears.

My magic wasn’t working.

Nothing, not even a spark. I never believed that blood could actually run cold, but mine did.

The few times that I’d actually used the Saghred, I’d been winded afterward, sometimes knocked on my ass, but I’d never lost my magic. Could it have been the manacles? Were there aftereffects from being locked in them after a certain length of time? Or could the Saghred have been pissed off at not getting Phaelan’s soul and decided to suck out my magic instead? I didn’t know, had no way of knowing, and it didn’t matter.

A werecrab was here and my magic was not.

And we were getting out of here.

Did I need magic to ruin Taltek Balmorlan and Carnades Silvanus? No. The only thing I needed was the documents I had. Documents that I would get out of here in one piece and us along with them. The only thing Phaelan valued more than his skin was the goblin gold stuffed in every pocket he had. I wasn’t about to tell him that gold wasn’t his to spend. If avarice and the urge to spend Balmorlan’s hard-stolen gold was enough motivation to take down a giant crab, I’d let him think every last coin was his to have, to hold, and to spend.

I actually heard Phaelan swallow next to me. “So do your seeker thing and—”

“It isn’t working.”

“What?”

“My magic isn’t working.” I said it without moving my lips. Hell, I wasn’t about to move a muscle. I stayed frozen to the spot. If I moved, the werecrab would move, and if the werecrab moved, chances were that I’d go from frozen elf to tasty treat in two clicks of a claw.

Realization dawned on my cousin at the same time that all the blood seemed to run out of his face. “You’re just running low on juice, right?”

Phaelan didn’t want to hear that this was more than a momentary inconvenience. He didn’t like magic, but he’d never objected to me using it to save his ass.

“No juice,” I said.

“Shit.”

The crab hadn’t attacked us yet. That was good, but it could also be bad. The thing could have been trained to keep escaping prisoners right where they were until the guards could get there. I didn’t know if this was what was keeping the crab at pincer’s length, but I wasn’t going to ask too many questions.

I risked moving my head and looked around for something, anything we could use as a weapon. The dungeon was lit by lightglobes, not torches, so there was no handy fire on a stick. Nothing on the wall or on the floor . . . wait a minute. A metal tray with the remains of a meal sat outside of a cell door. It was a pathetic excuse for a weapon, but if you didn’t have what you needed, you made do with what you had.

I carefully backed up and bent down for the tray without taking my eyes off the snapping claws. I had no idea why the thing hadn’t rushed us by now, but I wasn’t going to look a gift werecrab in the mandibles.

The tray wasn’t heavy, which was good for a seeker with numb arms. The metal caught the light and I damned near blinded myself. Crap it. What kind of dungeon had fancy, shiny metal . . .

Shiny?

That could work . . . only one way to find out. I carefully stepped forward. I didn’t have to be close, just close enough.

Phaelan caught a glimpse of light reflecting off the tray, and a slow grin spread over his face. “Can you make the thing back up past the armory door?”

“That’s the plan.”

“We arm ourselves and then have some crab shish kebob.”

I could be in the mood for crab.

I caught the reflection of a lightglobe just behind the werecrab, and carefully angled the tray toward its eyestalks. I got a reflection, bright and blinding.

On the freaking wall.

At that moment, the werecrab got tired of waiting.

The crab scuttled at me faster than something that should be served with melted butter had a right to. I squealed before I could stop myself, thrust the tray out in front of me, and scurried backward, Phaelan right there with me. The only thing between us and being pinched and picked to death was a flimsy, shiny tray.

The werecrab stopped, eyestalks flinching backward in what would have been surprise or fear on something that didn’t have eight legs. Then it backed up, virtually tripping over those spindly legs trying to get away from that tray. What the hell was it—

Its reflection.

It was probably the thing’s first look at itself, and it clearly didn’t like what it saw. We weren’t the only ones scared of that crab—it was afraid of itself.

“That’s it, you ugly beastie,” Phaelan murmured from beside me. “Back up.”

The werecrab did.

“Nice and slow,” Phaelan told me. “Too fast and he might fight back.”

I shot Phaelan the mother of all shut-up looks.

“Sorry, that was obvious, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

We continued walking forward and the werecrab continued cooperating. For now. Scary things had a tendency to be less scary if they didn’t immediately try to bite your face off. A werecrab probably had a tiny brain, but I didn’t want to find out how long it’d take him to figure out what he saw in that tray wasn’t a scary thing and that he was running from himself—or worse, decided to kill his reflection.

“Just a little farther,” Phaelan murmured.

I risked a quick glance beyond the werecrab and saw blades, blessed blades hanging on the wall of a room with the miracle of an unlocked and open door. If Lady Luck wasn’t speaking to me, maybe she at least wanted to leave Phaelan alive long enough for a chat.

The werecrab backed up past the door, and Phaelan darted inside. After a few seconds of clanging and commotion, my cousin came out of that room with enough steel to start his own war. He slipped a long dagger through my belt at the small of my back, and I swear my heart rate dropped by half at the weight of some good, sharp steel.

Phaelan didn’t waste time making use of what he’d pilfered. He clutched a huge elven broadsword in both hands and lunged.

The crab’s claw shot out and snapped it in half.

The blade clattered loudly to the floor. Tempered steel cut like paper with scissors.

That was bad.

Phaelan dropped what was left of the sword, drew a pair of short swords, and rethought his strategy.

The long dagger Phaelan had given me wasn’t long enough for me to risk my arm by getting inside that thing’s snipping-in-half distance.

Phaelan and I immediately went with a tactic that had served us well in the past—distract and destroy. I made use of the tray for the distraction part, but unless I got my magic back—or my hands on a really long spear—the destruction was up to Phaelan.

I didn’t think crustaceans had tactics. I was wrong. The crab had two pincers and poisonous shell edges, and was doing its best to pin one or both of us against the wall so it could use any of the above. The werecrab maneuvered with amazing agility, darting in to attack with its pincers, and quickly scuttling back when Phaelan lunged with his short swords. He didn’t want to try his luck stabbing anywhere on that armored shell. He needed to get a blade in its belly, without getting his hands snipped off.

The damn thing’s eyes could swivel on those stalks, and nothing we did caught it off guard.

Wait a minute.

Eyes. On stalks.

Saghred-induced exhaustion must have made me dimwitted.

“The eyestalks,” I told Phaelan.

“Yeah, the damn thing sees me just fine,” Phaelan growled.

“Cut them off!”

The crab could still kill us if it couldn’t see us, but blinding it would at least give one of us a chance to get the heel of a boot under its shell and flip it on its back. Then Phaelan could drive a blade into its vitals. Of course severing its eyestalks and flipping it onto its back meant going in between its pincers. Distract with the tray, take out the eyestalks with the blade, then kick and flip. Sounded simple. It also sounded like something we’d better get right the first time.

I feinted to the right with the tray, and the werecrab slammed a claw dead into the center of the tray, just like a boxer’s punch. At the same time, Phaelan lunged for the eyestalks.

And the crab’s other claw neatly clipped the short sword in half.

The blade clattered to the floor to join the other. I used the tray like a combo of a shield and club, beating the claw back and hitting any other part of it that I could. Phaelan was still moving, and a split second later had sliced through both eyestalks using his other blade with a yell that sounded more like a terrified girly scream. I caught the bottom edge of the crab’s shell with the toe of my boot and kicked with everything I had left.

The crab was a lot lighter than it looked and flipped right over. Only now its legs and pinchers were flailing madly over its vulnerable underside. Phaelan did some evasive darting and weaving, and when he saw an opening, drove his sword in up to the hilt. The legs slowed their flailing, and the pincers faltered in mid pinch mere inches from his face. Phaelan jumped back, pulling his blade back with him. It was coated with something icky that bubbled and sizzled on the steel. He dropped the sword before the bubbling reached his hand.

The werecrab twitched twice then was still. I wasn’t about to turn my back on it, dead or not.

I stared at the tray. It was almost bent in half and in the center was a jagged hole where the claw’s edge had punched through the metal.

I slumped against the wall, breathing hard. Apparently pounding a werecrab with a tray took it out of a girl. “Gimme a minute,” I panted.

Phaelan ran into the armory and replenished his weapons, and got a sword for me. “We don’t have a minute.”

“How ’bout a second?”

“How about I carry you?”

I made myself stand up. “How about you just find the way out of here.”

Phaelan looked down the hall beyond the dead crab. He wasn’t seeing the hall; he was remembering what was on Tanik’s blueprint. At least I hoped he was remembering.

“Follow me,” he said.

For once, I was happy to do what he said, no questions asked.

Turned out I should have asked questions.

“How much farther?” I asked after we’d gone up one floor and through another ten minutes.

I was more than a little uneasy. Not that I wanted to find out that the werecrab had backup, or all of the guards were waiting for us in the dark just ahead, but a dungeon without any guards—while nice—wasn’t right, and I didn’t trust our good fortune or believe it for a second.

“Uh . . . I’m not exactly sure,” Phaelan admitted.

I blinked. “What do you mean you’re not sure? Where are we?”

“I’m not sure of that, either.”

Phaelan looked slightly embarrassed. It wasn’t a look I’d seen on him often, and considering what it implied, I didn’t want to see it on him now.

I gaped at him. “We’re lost?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. You don’t know where we are. That’s called lost.”

“The blueprints didn’t include this floor. Besides, I prefer to think of it as temporarily misplaced.”

I took a breath and let it out slowly. I told myself we were fine and we were going to stay that way. At the moment no one was trying to kill us or clip us in half. So it was all good. It still didn’t alter the fact that we were lost with an exit hopefully still somewhere ahead of us. It also didn’t change the spooky silence behind us—silence I didn’t trust.

The silence didn’t stay silent for long.

At the pounding of heavy boots on the stone floor, Phaelan and I ran like hell for the first open doorway we could find. Thankfully, the room was not only empty, but dark.

A trio of embassy guards ran past us. I adjusted my grip on my sword, held my breath, tried to think invisible thoughts, and hoped Phaelan was doing the same. While I didn’t want to go in the same direction as a bunch of elven guards, they appeared to be going up to the embassy’s main floor. Coincidentally, up for them happened to be out for us. We trailed them at a safe distance.

The embassy’s entry hall was packed. Mostly with embassy employees, but I gave a silent cheer when I caught a glimpse of burnished steel Guardian battle armor just inside the massive embassy doors. I wasn’t close enough to see who they were, but the fact that they were here was enough.

No one had seen me and Phaelan, and for now, we wanted to keep it that way. We ducked behind one of the absurdly big columns around the edge of the room. We were far enough away from the crowd of curious onlookers not to be found, but close enough to hear what was going on.

A man was speaking. Loudly. He wanted everyone to hear every word he had to say. I knew that voice. I only heard the last part of what he was saying, but those words made my day, week, and life.

“Ambassador Giles Keril, in the name of Her Majesty, Queen Lisara Ambrosiel, I relieve you of your post and place you under arrest for aiding and abetting the kidnapping and torture of elven subjects, obstructing justice, and treason against the elven government.”

I grinned like I hadn’t grinned in weeks. It wasn’t just that Giles Keril, patsy to Taltek Balmorlan, was about to be locked up in his own embassy. It was the beautiful sound of a voice from beyond the grave.

Duke Markus Sevelien picked himself one hell of a time to return from the dead.