A Crystal of Time (The School for Good and Evil The Camelot Years #2) - Soman Chainani Page 0,143

of dirt that she, Teddy, and Aggie had fallen through to arrive in Gnomeland. Sophie climbed out of the rickshaw, the snakeskin cloaked tightly around her, and raised her palm into the dirt. Like quicksand, it grew wet and thick around her fingers, sucking up her hand, then her arm, then her hair, then her face. . . .

She pulled herself out the other side.

The din of war detonated through the abandoned Flowerground tunnel, shrieks and screams and thunderous slams reverberating. Lit green by glowing vines, the gnome blockade rose as far as she could see into the hollow, male and female gnomes of every age balancing on each other’s shoulders and locking arms to withstand the shattering smashes of Japeth’s scims against the pit.

But the gnomes’ defense had started to crack. Two scims had broken into the tunnel, scudding around the lattice of bodies, stabbing at will, as the gnomes tried to fend them off without losing grip on each other and collapsing the blockade.

Sophie pushed the rest of her body through the dirt, sliding between the legs of a big, muscled gnome—and almost knocked straight into Guinevere and the Sheriff. Agatha’s cat was clinging to the Sheriff’s sack, tied around the Sheriff’s bicep, the group of them hidden in the shadows of the blockade.

“I’m gonna fight those eely maggots and you can’t stop me,” the Sheriff growled at Reaper, but the cat knifed his claws into the Sheriff’s shoulder, baring his teeth.

“Meow,” the Gnome King commanded.

The Sheriff shoved his nose to the cat’s. “You rat-faced, skunk-smelling troll—”

Reaper’s body stiffened, his yellow eyes flaring.

“Meow!” he blurted suddenly. “Meow meow!”

He jumped off the Sheriff’s shoulder and sprinted for the dirt patch Sophie had just come through.

“Agatha! He says she’s in trouble!” Guinevere conveyed, dragging the Sheriff after Reaper. “And Tedros is with Agatha! If she’s in trouble, so is he—”

Agatha’s cat was about to dive through the dirt, back into Gnomeland, when he froze sharply. He glanced in Sophie’s direction, her body hidden beneath the snakeskin, and she ducked on all fours behind the hulking gnome. The cat peered harder. . . .

“Let’s go, then,” the Sheriff barked, shoving Reaper down through the dirt and helping Guinevere too, until both had disappeared.

Except the Sheriff didn’t follow.

The moment the cat was gone, the Sheriff flung his enchanted sack over the dirt pit, so that if anyone came back for him, they’d go flying into the sack instead. Then the Sheriff stormed towards the gnome Sophie was hiding behind and put his dirty boot on the gnome’s shoulder. The gnome yelped in surprise, but the Sheriff had already started to climb. More gnomes shrieked, alarmed by the massive, hairy human scaling them like a mountain, but they were arranged too precariously to fight, reduced to wayward slaps at the Sheriff’s head and bops at his nose. The Sheriff gritted his teeth, his boots digging into gnomes’ backs, their shouts and smacks getting louder and harder, until he was high enough to spot one of the two free-flying scims, puncturing gnome after gnome, about to collapse the center of the pyramid and send half the kingdom tumbling to its death. The loose scim shot towards the strongest gnome, who’d already been stabbed twice and was struggling to hold the blockade together. The scim’s sharp tip lined straight for the gnome’s neck—

The Sheriff swiped the eel into his bare hand. He bit off the scim’s head and spat it out, pulverized the rest with his fist, and dripped the goo into the darkness of the pit.

A thousand gnomes gaped at him.

They exploded into cheers, drowning out the rumbles of the scims outside.

Suddenly man’s best friend, the gnomes helped the Sheriff climb higher, chanting “GO SMELLY! GO SMELLY!” in reedy chorus. Taking advantage of their distraction, Sophie hopped up gnomes in the Sheriff’s wake, the dwarfish creatures grunting at her weight and swiveling their heads, only to see nothing there. As she scaled higher, Sophie heard more boisterous cheers and glimpsed the Sheriff crushing the second scim, sending its leaky guts spattering down and spraying onto Sophie’s snakeskin. The gnome she was climbing gawked at the seemingly levitating goo, but Sophie was already past him, chasing the Sheriff, who was headed for the lid of the tree stump.

Outside, the scim assault on the stump ceased, the vibration of the thunderous blasts against the pit petering out to nothing. Gnomes erupted in celebration, thinking the battle won, but the Sheriff only climbed faster, as if the