Gathering Storm: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 17)

by R. L. King

  “Still working on this thing with the rifts.” He quickly caught them up with the latest information, including the part about Kolinsky’s and Madame Huan’s unexpected reactions. “I was feeling fairly stumped last night, but something Verity said gave me an insight.”

  “Always thought that girl’s brighter’n you are.” Eddie’s grin widened. “So what’s the big revelation?”

  “Maps. I’ve been looking at my ley line maps, but if Stefan and Madame Huan know what’s going on and won’t tell me, that could mean it’s happened before. So I plan to dig into some older maps and see if I can turn anything up. Want to join me?”

  “Try to stop us,” Ward said, getting up.

  Eddie closed his book. “Now’t you mention it, I’ve got a few things back at the London library that might be ’elpful. You two stay ’ere and ’ave a butcher’s, and I’ll pop down and see if I can find anything. I’ll ring if do.”

  Several hours later, to Stone’s disappointment, none of them had turned up anything useful.

  He sighed, using magic to switch on a lamp in the library and rolling up the latest in a series of oversized vellum maps he’d been examining. “Nothing,” he said with a sigh.

  Ward looked equally discouraged. “Doesn’t appear so,” he agreed. “It was a good idea, but so far all I’ve found is variations on the standard ley line maps.”

  Stone had found the same. Some of them had been quite old and beautifully rendered, and a few had been magically active or interesting in other ways, but neither he nor Ward had discovered anything out of the ordinary regarding the locations of magical rifts. A call to Eddie in London had verified that he hadn’t either.

  “Sorry, mate,” he said when Stone phoned him that evening. He sounded tired. “I’ve dug clear down to the second basement—there’s stuff in there I ’aven’t looked at in years—but there’s nothin’ like what you’re lookin’ for. All you’ve done is given me a big pile of interestin’ stuff I’m gonna need to find time to go through now, so thanks for that.”

  “Well, I appreciate your looking, anyway. I suppose I should head back to Surrey and see if I can find anything in my own library. I doubt it, though. If it’s not here or in the London archive, I can’t imagine I’ve got it squirreled away someplace.”

  “Come on down here first. After spendin’ a whole day diggin’ through a bunch of dusty old maps, I have got to have me a pint or two at the Dragon. Or three. And you and Ward are comin’, so no arguin’ about it.”

  Stone thought about begging off, but what was the point? A few pints and a couple hours’ worth of relaxation sounded like just the thing—he was too tired to do any more serious study tonight anyway, and his head ached from hours of peering at the tiny, crabbed print on centuries-old maps.

  “Fine.” He glanced at Ward and mouthed, Pub? When his friend nodded with enthusiasm, he said, “We’ll be down in half an hour. I suppose you two might as well get back to the usual tomorrow. No point in wasting too much more time on this.”

  “Somethin’ will turn up, mate,” Eddie said with surprising sympathy. “Maybe you just need to lubricate your brain or summat.”

  To his surprise, Stone managed to put the whole situation with the rifts and the maps out of his mind for a couple hours once he and Ward met Eddie at the Dancing Dragon Pub in London. Seated at their favorite table in the back room, the three of them, by unspoken agreement, talked about everything but the day’s failed task.

  Stone didn’t do a lot of talking himself, but a couple of pints did relax him enough that Eddie’s endless football stories didn’t bore him as they usually did. By the time they rose to leave at nearly eleven p.m., he was feeling a pleasant combination of tipsy and tired that told him he’d probably manage to get a good night’s sleep tonight.

  “Thanks,” he told his friends as they left the pub and stepped out into the cold, sleety night. “That wasn’t what I would have chosen to do tonight, but I think I needed it.”

  Eddie clapped him on the back. “You should listen to us more often, Stone. I think we know what you need more than you do. Ain’t that right, Arthur?”

  Ward smiled. “If you don’t know by now that Stone never listens to anybody, I can’t help you.”

  “Stubborn, ’e is.” He grinned. “Anyway, got an early mornin’ tomorrow—back to the old grind. I’ll let you know if I turn anything up, mate.”

  Stone thought about heading back to Surrey so he could get an earlier start in the morning, but by the time the black cab dropped him at the London house, his eyelids were drooping so hard he could barely trudge up the stairs to the front door. Easier to just sleep here tonight and take the portal to Surrey in the morning. That also meant he’d be less likely to disturb Aubrey by showing up so late. He made a mental note to call the University in the morning about taking one more day, then headed upstairs to the bedroom he used on the rare occasions he stayed at the house.

  Even though he was dead tired, he had a hard time falling asleep. It might have been the unfamiliar surroundings, the house’s chill (he hadn’t bothered with the heat since he’d only be here for the night) or all the pints catching up with him, but for whatever reason he found himself tossing and turning. Every time he managed to drop off to sleep, bizarre, half-remembered dreams woke him up, leaving his head pounding in confusion. The only thing he could recall about the dreams was that they seemed to center around maps, which made sense given how he’d spent his day. They swirled through his mind in a jumble: huge ones unfurled on tables, smaller ones in books, old and yellowed ones on globes, spinning so fast he couldn’t even make out the details—

  He snapped awake.

  That time, the dream had been different. The previous ones had featured only the rolled maps and the ones in books, but this time his subconscious had added in a globe.

  Ah—then he remembered. It must have come from the globe on the shelf at Madame Huan’s shop, next to the bowling bag the boy was looking at. Something in his tired brain must have put together “maps” and “globes” and added yet another layer of confusion to his dream.

  He settled back to the pillow and had almost dropped off to sleep again when another image swirled into his mind—not a dream this time, but an actual image.

  A familiar image, of the sitting room in this very house.

  Bloody hell.

  Stone leaped out of bed, snatched his T-shirt and jeans from the floor, and yanked them on as quickly as he could, heart pounding hard.

  It was probably an absurd thought—he was misremembering, or his vision was based on things he’d seen years ago.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  He pounded downstairs in his stocking feet, sliding to a stop in the doorway of the formal sitting room on the third floor. He fumbled for the switch to turn on the overhead light, then cast his gaze around, hardly daring to hope.

  William Desmond’s sitting room had not changed appreciably since the first time Stone had seen it, at age fifteen when he’d first met Desmond while being evaluated for his potential apprenticeship. Back then, he’d thought it looked like something out of a museum, full of antique furniture, priceless oriental rugs, heavy drapes, and walls paneled in exotic wood. Every wall sported a painting that would have been at home in an art gallery, and several of its surfaces included classical statuary or finely-wrought lamps. Everything in the room was in a style of old-world class; Stone remembered being nervous about sitting on one of the fine sofas because he’d come in out of the rain and feared his damp clothes would damage the fabric.

  Desmond, however, had not been fussy or touchy about his homes and possessions; the man had been so comfortable with his vast wealth and so gracious in his manners that Stone soon realized he probably could have walked in covered head to toe in mud and Desmond wouldn’t have done more than offer a patrician look of disapproval. True, he probably had a cleaning spell to deal with the problem, but that was beside the point.

  If the item Stone sought was still here,
it would be on the far side of the room, near the fireplace and behind one of the massive sofas. He hurried across the room, heart still pounding. Even if it was there it almost certainly wouldn’t help, but he had to check every possibility.

  There it was, right where he remembered it. The large globe, nearly three feet in diameter, sat on the floor in a carved wooden stand that allowed it to rotate freely. It was of an old-fashioned style, done all in rich, antique browns with the oceans shown in lighter tan. Stone had no idea how old it was; the labels on the land masses, tiny and difficult to read, revealed it was definitely older than the founding of the United States, but yet the outlines of the continents appeared far more accurate than other maps from the same time period might have indicated. What had undoubtedly made it more interesting to Desmond, though, was the interconnecting network of lines that crisscrossed its entire surface: a three-dimensional rendering of the same ley lines Stone had been studying in his books and maps. It also included a few locations of magical interest, most of them in Europe, but nothing that corresponded to the sites Stone had visited.

  He let his breath out in a disappointed sigh. Well, it had been a thought, but in truth he wasn’t surprised it hadn’t panned out. Perhaps Verity’s theory that Kolinsky and Madame Huan somehow knew about the rifts from previous appearances wasn’t correct after all. Perhaps they merely had information from some other source he didn’t have access to.

  He was about to turn and leave the room when another idea occurred to him and he spun back around. He tried to remember if he’d ever looked at the globe with magical sight before—it seemed almost impossible that he hadn’t, but then again, even back when he was an apprentice he hadn’t sat around examining every place he ever entered. He’d probably taken a quick look around, noticed that a large number of items in the room glowed with magical energy, and then moved on. Large numbers of items in every room of both this place and Caventhorne glowed with magical energy. He probably would have been more surprised if they hadn’t.

  He crouched next to the globe and shifted his sight.

  Instantly, it lit up with arcane illumination.

  “Yes…” he murmured, resisting the urge to pump his fist. Instead, he leaned in closer, turning the globe until North America was in front of him.

  Immediately, he spotted two things: the ley lines shone with faint glows, and a number of other glowing areas were scattered around—not just on the North American continent, but the others as well. He didn’t see a lot of them; the first thing he looked for was whether they all existed at ley line confluences, and he quickly discovered that they did. He couldn’t find one example of the larger glows (“larger” being a relative term, since they were barely bigger than pinpricks and only slightly brighter than the ley lines themselves) that didn’t occur at a convergence of at least two ley lines.

  They didn’t occur at all the ley line confluences, however. In fact, even more oddly, there didn’t seem to be any logic to where they did occur. He found several at places where only a pair of lines crossed, but none in far more potent locations. The first places he checked—the site of Caventhorne with five converging ley lines, his own house in Surrey with three, and the northern-Nevada area where Burning Man had been held, which featured a gargantuan nexus of ten—did not include the glowing pinpricks.

  Stone frowned, leaning in closer and sharpening his sight. That was odd. Almost invariably, ley line convergences corresponded with power: the more ley lines crossed in a given area, the more magical potential that area possessed. So if these odd rifts were popping up at locations of power, it seemed logical they’d appear where the power was greatest.

  That could mean one of two things: most likely, that the glows didn’t represent the locations of potential rifts, but rather something else Stone had no idea about. That made them interesting and ripe for later study, but not useful to his current problem. The second was that the glows did indicate rift spots, but their placement had nothing to do with relative power level.

  Carefully, he spun the globe again and leaned in even closer. He wished he had his jeweler’s loupe, but didn’t want to take the time to retrieve Desmond’s from his office. Instead, he waved his hand and shut off the light, bathing the room in darkness except for the unearthly arcane glow from the globe and the other nearby magically-active items.

  In the darkness, the pinpricks stood out a bit more against the faint ley lines. Stone turned the globe again, focusing in on the eastern and Midwestern parts of the United States. Obviously there weren’t any labels indicating state borders since the globe predated states, and Stone’s American geography outside the West Coast was spotty, but he immediately noticed a pair of the glows in the approximate places he expected the Pittsburgh and Iowa areas to be. He’d have to check them against a conventional map, but he was fairly sure they were close enough not to be coincidences.

  The other thing he noticed with his closer examination was that the pinprick dots were slightly different colors. Confining his search to the United States, Canada, and western European areas, he discovered that the dots varied from pale yellow-green to a more solid blue, and that similar colors seemed to congregate in clusters. For example, the three dots in the UK area were all blue, the five in western Europe were more of a teal hue, and the ones in the United States—about twenty, though he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t missed any—varied between yellow in the north and orange in the south.

  Stone sat back on his heels, barely aware that his legs were protesting his uncomfortable crouch. Why would the lights appear clustered? Were those in proximity to each other somehow related?

  He leaped up, ignoring the pain in his knees, and hurried over to the bookshelf. He retrieved a handsome, leather-bound world atlas and a book of modern ley-line maps, then used magic to drag the globe’s wheeled stand over next to a low table and pulled a chair in front of it. Seated comfortably now facing the globe, he opened the atlas and the ley-line book to two-page spreads of the United States, then began comparing those maps against the one on the globe.

  No doubt about it: the pinpricks on the globe corresponded to ley line convergences in Iowa and the Pittsburgh area. Stone’s heart began beating faster again: it appeared he was on to something after all. The only problem was, the globe, though large for its type, still didn’t show enough detail to allow him to home in on precise locations. He found three other yellow dots spread along the northern part of the United States, but couldn’t place them specifically enough to make them useful. If only he could zoom in on an area, like you could with a map on a computer.

  “Hang on…” he murmured. “Who says I can’t?”

  The globe was obviously a highly magical object, and it didn’t make sense for those pinprick locations to be there at all if they didn’t give the user enough information to find them. There had to be a way to do this.

  He scanned the bookshelves near the globe’s initial position again, until he found a familiar, large magnifying glass. He’d seen Desmond use it many times while poring over tiny print in books during his apprenticeship, and had occasionally felt a brief, smug pride that his own young eyes didn’t need the same kind of augmentation. But what if Desmond hadn’t been using it in lieu of reading glasses after all?

  He summoned it to him, noting that when it came into proximity with the globe, it too began to glow with magical energy. Barely breathing, he moved it into position over the globe’s map.

  Instantly, the tiny features snapped into focus, revealing details Stone hadn’t noticed before. In fact, it almost seemed as if the map’s topographical features took on a pseudo-three-dimensional appearance. As he moved the glass around in wonder, minuscule mountains, rivers, and other points of interest rose into view.

  That was fascinating, but it still didn’t completely solve Stone’s problem. Because the map predated the United States, it included only intermittent labels, and most of the ones that did appear were no longer accurate. If he was going to do this, he’d have to
do it by geographical features rather than place-name labels.

  It was hard, painstaking work. By the time Stone had managed to locate the three yellow dots’ locations on his modern map, two hours had passed. He set the map aside, fighting against his drooping eyelids, the pain in his back from hunching over the map, and the growing dull headache from peering through the magnifying glass to examine tiny geographical features on the globe. He’d planned to do the same thing for the dots in the UK, but reluctantly had to admit he didn’t have the energy. He’d have to get some sleep. At least now he had three more potential locations to check: one in northern Oregon, one in central Wyoming, and one in southern Michigan. If he’d had it to do again he probably would have concentrated on the UK locations first, since he was here now and they’d be easier to check, but he did need to get back to the US. Might as well check those out first, he decided.

  For now, though, sleep. It had been a productive evening after all, and he was sure, now that he had a next step, his spinning mind wouldn’t trouble him further tonight.

  Tomorrow, he could get started tracking this problem. And if Kolinsky and Madame Huan had a problem with it, they could bloody well show up in person and tell him why.

  31

  The first thing Stone did when he got back home was call Verity.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked, sounding sleepy.

  “I think so, yes.” He explained what he’d discovered on the globe. He’d taken an hour after he’d gotten up that morning to study it again, verifying that he hadn’t made mistakes locating any of the areas due to fatigue, but no, they were right where he expected them to be. He made a mental note to come back and check the ones in the UK if his theory with the US locations panned out.