Chapter 20

Ricky looked at the six men who were some 5m below him.

He grimaced as he recognised two of them. Some men just have a foul stench about them. Ricky guessed that if they had worn any magical items when he first met them forty-five years before, they must have been only had one gem at the most.

The fact that they didn’t look a lot older suggests they had. Whatever device they wore, it was obviously corrupt. He had a feeling they hadn’t long stepped down the path of evil when he had met them previously, as he would have known the smell instantly.

They may not look as old as they should, but they didn’t look that well either. Not that Ricky considered most Burgis males that pretty it the first place. Yet it was obvious that corruption was eating their souls, as far as he was concerned. It made them very ugly in his eyes.

He now wondered how far down the path Kerr was. Micky hadn’t mentioned a foul stench coming from him once her items were activated. So maybe he wasn’t quite as corrupt as these men as far as using corrupt magical items went. His soul was definitely black, but that was different from the smell of evil magic.

“Simon, how long until you have the spell ready to transport us out of here?” The shortest of the men, a Fayle, wearing the black habit, asked the Pix, who was wearing a dark green and rather stained habit.

“About half an hour, Lord Jay. With the crystals being so active, we should have little trouble shifting to your portal. We just need to create a ring big enough to also include the dragon since you wish to keep this one. Ronan has to crush more crystals into the pot, and I need to get at least one more bag of salt into it.”

“Then do it. The sooner we are away from here, the better. Kerr will not be happy to find us gone as it is. He may have been necessary to help get us here, but now we have this lovely young female dragon, we don’t need him anymore. He can go back to his own plots and schemes until I need him again.”

“Yes, my Lord,” Simon answered. “Alberto, go get my other trunk. I need more salt,” he yelled at the man wearing the poorly patched, dark blue habit. He has been sitting on a rock near the wall and was picking his nails with his knife.

The man grunted and moved to Ricky’s right towards the passage they came in from. Ricky noticed that the two men who he knew of were the ones left guarding Silver. He guessed that it was their job.

Silver was laying on her side, off to his left and near the mouth of the cavern to the nursery. The captors had tied the large woven net over her wings and her arms. Her tail had also been pulled under the net so she couldn’t swing it around.

The banging had been them placing a set of thick-chained leg shackles on her legs so she couldn’t move far when standing. A type of muzzle covered her mouth so she couldn’t bite or breath her vapour on the men.

Ricky was distracted from his rescue plan when he heard the man called Jay say to the man called Simon, “It is a shame Kerr let Lady Dee escape. I had plans for her. However, she is now used-goods since the Hermit would have easily dispelled the stink charm that I had put on her to distract Kerr.’

“I’m sure his reputation is true, and he would have gotten his fetid cock into her as soon as he could. You know that she would have made a suitable wife for me,” he commented, as he twirled the cane he held through his fingers.

Simon frowned as he was crumbling dried herbs into the large pot that Ronan tipped some shards of Quaz crystals into before he went back to crushing some more in a mortar. “Is she not, Kerr’s wife? He did warn us not to touch her.”

Jay gave a nasty chuckle. “Since when has that stopped me getting what I want? He only married her to get a hold of her trust fund and the deeds to all of the holdings that Duke Dee and Lady Deane held.”

“They owned a lot of land with the mining rights, but the Duke didn’t do any mining. He was sitting on a fortune. I had half an idea of just killing him and claiming Lady Deane for myself.”

“She had been a bit of a roaster in her time. However, I doubt she would have come to me anymore willingly than her daughter would have. I have no idea how Kerr expects to get Michelina back from the Hermit.”

“He seems to think he has some hold over her, but I don’t know what. She stank of pure magic when she came near me on the trip here. I would have had fun corrupting her, all the same.”

“As you know, I only had us help Kerr kill the Dee’s so that I could get my hands on the scent. I knew that Lady Deane had the last known bottle of it. That arsehole, Seth, stopped my little game before her son got to use it. Being a potions witch, I knew she would keep it.”

“I have no idea what possessed my sister to dump Seth and his brat at the crossroads. I can only assume she thought the cold would kill them. He’d have been a piss-poor mage if he had let that happen.”

“And as we both know; that dragon loving bastard was even more trouble than my sister had reckoned on,” Jay said as he fingered a long scar that ran across his face and down his neck to disappear into his habit.

He took a long drink from a bottle, as he watched the two men work. “It is amusing that after all the trouble I went to, to get that scent, we didn’t even need it. I couldn’t believe our luck when Queen Fleur’s latest fledgling flew straight into my arms. The God of Darkness, truly loves me,” Jay chuckled with ill-humour.

“One day, she too will pay,” he finished more ominously and chugged from the bottle again.

While Ricky had taken note of the conversation, he was more interested in what Ronan and Simon were doing.

He watched carefully as they put different measures of ingredients into the big pot. Alberto had come back with a modest-sized chest and dropped it on the ground. He rummaged through the chest before he handed Simon different sacks depending on what the man asked for. Simon was reading the items from a list written in his little magic book.

Ricky itched to look at the book. His musings were rudely interrupted when he received the equivalent of a slap up-the-side of his head from Silver. In a very angry and frightened tone, she told him to hurry up and help her as her hands were going numb and her legs really hurt.

Ricky noticed that none of the mages reacted to her talking to him. He and Silver had developed a personal mental chat channel when she first lived with him. It seemed that the other magicians couldn’t hear them either. None of the captors even look at Silver when she mentally scolded Ricky.

‘Anything special I need to know about the net?’ Ricky sent to Silver.

‘It had an entanglement charm on it. Not nearly as good as the one you taught me, so I easily broke it. Now the net just needs to be untied and pulled off me. The contraption on my face is bloody annoying, but it can simply be unbuckled.’

‘The leg irons are bit different as they will need to be cut off. The black man bashed some sort of pin in the back of them and then used magic to fuse the metal.’

“He didn’t bother shielding me from the magical heat either, the bastard. My skin still stings, but I’m sure one of your salves will help fix the damage he did. So, what is the plan?’