Steel and Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  He walked to the centermost of the three chairs and sat down, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. “What do you know of a man named Harrison?”

  Ah, here we go. Stone had wondered if he would get to that eventually. “Who?”

  This time, the man used the electric current instead of trying to suffocate him. He jerked and bucked in his chair until it stopped, clamping his mouth shut against a scream.

  After a few seconds, the man waved a languid hand and the pain stopped, leaving Stone panting and shaking.

  “Would you like to try a different answer?” He turned and bent until his face was level with Stone’s. “Let me explain something to you, Dim, just in case you haven’t caught on to it yet. You are in a bad situation here. I can do whatever I like with you—I can even kill you, if I determine you aren’t cooperating fully. Oh, the Council might be displeased, since they want the information you can provide, but they trust my judgment. It will be a mere slap on the wrist for me.

  “But I don’t need to kill you,” he added. “Not yet, anyway. That would be…wasteful. So far the methods I’ve used on you have been fairly gentle, with no permanent effects. That could change. Or I can give my healer colleague a call, which will allow me to do truly horrific things to you. My colleague will then heal you after you’ve had a chance to experience them for a while, and then we’ll start all over again until you talk. I don’t want to do that—it’s messy, and I honestly don’t enjoy that kind of thing, even against the Dim. But the Council wants answers, and it’s my job to get them. Do I make myself clear?”

  Stone, his heart still pounding hard from the latest jolt, could only stare at him. “You people are monsters…” he whispered. “All of you.” He braced for another attack.

  It didn’t come. “We aren’t,” the man said instead, rising to stand. “You may think so, in your limited way, but everything I’m doing here is for the greater good.”

  “Your greater good,” Stone muttered.

  “I’m not going to debate philosophy with a Dim,” the man said dismissively. His expression hardened again. “Now—my patience is growing thin. You will answer my questions.”

  Stone bowed his head. He had no doubt the man was telling the truth, and that he was willing to resort to full-blown torture to get the information he sought. He also knew without his magic he had little chance of withstanding such treatment. His best bet was to keep his aura under control and tell as much of the truth as he could, especially since he realized he didn’t know much that could get anyone, including himself, in trouble. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll answer your questions. What will happen to me if I do? Are you planning to kill me?”

  “Of course not. You’ll be put in prison, where you’ll be given work suited to your…limited abilities. We always have need of those to perform the most menial and unpleasant tasks here in Temolan. I won’t lie to you—it won’t be enjoyable, but you’ll be safe as long as you behave yourself. And it’s better than execution, or exile.”

  Bloody brilliant. What a thing to look forward to. And there was that mention of “exile” again. He decided not to ask about it now. “Fine,” he repeated, shoulders slumping. They still hurt from pulling against his bonds. “What do you want to know?”

  “As I asked before—what do you know about a man named Harrison?”

  “Not much. That’s the truth,” he added quickly. “I only ever met him once.”

  “You met him?” That seemed to surprise the man. “When?”

  “Years ago.”

  “Where?”

  “In a place you’ve never heard of.” At the man’s warning glare, he added, “A place called Las Vegas.” Once again, he watched for any reaction that revealed his interrogator might have heard of it, but there was none. He glanced up, taking a chance. “May I ask you a question?”

  “You may ask. Whether I answer—or punish you for your insolence—will be up to me.”

  “No insolence,” Stone said. “Just genuine curiosity. Who is Harrison here? What is he?”

  The man seemed honestly taken aback by the question. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said. I only met him briefly, a long time ago, and it was a long way from here. Why do you care about him? Is he somebody important? Is he wanted?”

  “He is a traitor,” the man said, his expression darkening. “And that is all you need to know. Why were you seeking him now?”

  “Because I wanted his help with something.”

  The man looked at him with disdain. “What could he possibly help you with? Did anyone contact you about him? Did you talk to anyone in Drendell?”

  “Yes. But they turned out to be working for you lot—or those bounty hunters you hired to find me.” He didn’t say anything about the man he’d initially talked to at the Fisherman’s Rest, and took care to control his aura—as best he could manage, anyway, since he still couldn’t see if his efforts were doing any good.

  “Yes, we’ve heard the Rest is one of the places they look for recruits. It won’t be any longer,” he added with satisfaction.

  “Did you burn it down like you did Faran’s shop?” Stone asked before he could stop himself. Once again, he braced for attack.

  And once again, the man didn’t take the bait. “No,” he said calmly. “But we did arrest its owners, workers, and several of the customers. Depending on what we get out of them, they’ll be subject to exile or execution. The Fisherman’s Rest will need to be under…new management.” He focused on Stone again. “Now…answer this next question carefully, because if you lie to me, I promise things won’t go well for you. Did you find any leads to locate Harrison?”

  “No,” Stone said. “Other than to ask at the Fisherman’s Rest, which was why I was there. Do you honestly think that if I knew how to find him, I’d have spent my time delivering meat and hanging about at dodgy bars looking for information?” He wondered if they’d captured the mage he’d talked to, or if the man had actually been in league with them, scouting out potential rebels.

  “Who told you to ask at the Fisherman’s Rest?”

  Stone met his gaze, hoping hard that his aura control was still working. “Someone sent me a note. It came to the shop one day.”

  The man’s expression grew dangerous. “You can’t read, Dim. I know this. How did you read a note?”

  “I didn’t,” he said, keeping his voice even and injecting just enough of a tremble into it to feign fear. “They’d drawn a picture of the sign. I remembered passing it on my rounds.”

  “What did you do with the note?” Either the man believed him, or he was stringing him along hoping for more.

  “I destroyed it. Burned it. I already had the feeling that letting on I knew anything about Harrison was a bad decision.” He met the interrogator’s gaze. “I was right about that, apparently, wasn’t I?”

  The man stared at him for several seconds, then turned away. “That will be all for today. We will review what you’ve told us, and if we have any further need for you, we’ll resume later at a time of our choosing.”

  “What will become of me now?” Stone asked.

  “That will be up to the Council.” Without another word, he turned and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Stone slumped in his chair, letting his breath out and wondering how long they’d leave him here before someone came after him. Right now, even the hard bed in his cell seemed preferable to sitting here in this chair with his shoulders forced back and his hands immobilized. He shivered against the room’s chill air and tried to find some motivation to keep fighting. Sudden despair gripped him—what was the point anymore? He was stuck here, he wasn’t getting out, and the best he could hope for at this point was some job cleaning toilets instead of death or being sent out to become a meal for the mutant scavengers.

  Not for the first time—or the twentieth—he cursed himself for his pathological inability to leave well enough alone.

  The door opened again and a
woman came in. She wore an outfit similar to the female jailer who’d taken him to the showers last night. “Come on,” she snapped. She gestured, and the bindings holding Stone to the chair released him.

  He slumped forward, barely catching himself before he fell, then stood. She locked his arms to his sides again and directed him back to his cell. This time, he didn’t even bother trying to memorize the route.

  20

  The next several days passed in a blur.

  Every one progressed in the same way: A harsh blare awoke Stone early each morning. Following a cold shower and a tasteless but filling meal eaten under a minder’s stern scrutiny, he was taken to the interrogation chamber for more questioning. Apparently the Council had decided it wasn’t done with him after all.

  It wasn’t always the same interrogator—the imposing man alternated with a slender, dark-haired woman and an older man with a chubby face and small, mean eyes—but the questions didn’t change much. They all wanted to know what he knew about Harrison, and he couldn’t tell them anything he hadn’t already told them, no matter how many different ways they asked. Despite the initial interrogator’s warning about physical torture, they never used any on him beyond the electrical jolts; in fact, never once did they touch him at all. He began to get the impression that the lofty Talented would rather dive naked into a vat of raw sewage than lower themselves to touch a Dim.

  For his part, he answered their questions and did his best to cooperate with them; the exception was that he never revealed that he’d once had magical powers. That wasn’t difficult, since they never asked him about it. Of course not: it wouldn’t occur to the Talented that some lowly Dim pig would ever have wielded magic. They never mentioned Tanissa at the clinic—he was fairly sure they hadn’t questioned her extensively, because they didn’t bring up either what she’d told him about Harrison or what he’d told her about being from another world. Apparently her recall back to Temolan had been for associating with him at all, not for revealing forbidden information to him. That also probably meant she wasn’t some deep-cover agent for the Talented. That, at least, was a relief.

  Following the interrogation sessions, he was taken to another part of the complex and put to work. The tasks were simple, physically demanding, and mind-numbing: scrubbing floors, cleaning bathrooms, carrying heavy loads of the prison’s laundry. Based on what he’d seen of the way things ran around here, Stone was certain his captors, if they’d wanted to, could easily have automated all of these tasks using magic, but instead they left them to the Dim. It was another data point in his increasingly negative view of these people.

  He wasn’t the only one performing these tasks—he often saw other prisoners, clad in the same shapeless tan garments he wore, toiling away under the watchful eye of Talented guards. Sometimes these others would glance at him in curiosity, or he at them, but they were never permitted to speak to each other beyond what was needed to do their jobs.

  One day, as he stood in the sweltering hot laundry room tossing stacks of dirty prison uniforms into a surprisingly mundane and old-fashioned-looking industrial washing machine, he noticed a pair of prisoners on the other side of the room briefly whispering to each other while they folded clothes from the dryer. The Talented guard wrenched them away from each other and hit them with some spell until they both collapsed, twitching, to the floor. Stone didn’t know if they were unconscious or dead, but he didn’t see either of them again after that.

  He’d noticed quickly after he started working here that the guards appeared to be both more brutal and less skilled as mages than the other Talented he’d met; their uniforms were simpler than their superiors’ (though still far more elaborate than necessary for their prison-guard roles), and the higher-ups, on the rare occasions they came down here, treated them with brisk courtesy rather than overt respect. Stone wondered if there were stratifications even among Talented society, based on different levels of magical power. It made sense—on Earth there were varying degrees of magic from minor talents all the way up to truly potent practitioners like Madame Huan and William Desmond. For the most part, the higher-ups didn’t deign to interact with Stone and the other Dim prisoners, but on the rare occasions they did they maintained a haughty distance; the guards, on the other hand, seemed to revel in snapping orders at the prisoners or punishing them for minor transgressions. Almost as if they were lording it over the only people they could legitimately consider themselves superior to. Stone filed that away as another data point.

  He tried his best to keep his spirits up and his mind occupied as he worked. Since the tasks didn’t require any thought or initiative—the Talented guards often mocked the prisoners for their cognitive limitations—it meant he could check out mentally while performing them. Mostly, he kept his brain exercised by going over various magical formulae and rituals; he’d tried thinking about his life back home, but that did nothing but add to his growing despair and sense of hopelessness. Why think about what it was looking more and more like he’d never see again?

  The day’s work was long and unrelenting—the prisoners were allowed only brief breaks to use the bathroom or bolt down their bland, meatless meals—and by the time Stone was taken back to his cell at the end of each session, he was exhausted. He never saw a clock, nor did he ever see any outside lights; he wondered if they even had windows down here, and wondered also if the average citizen of Temolan had any idea what life was like for these unfortunate Dim prisoners.

  Or if they even cared.

  21

  The first morning they didn’t take him for questioning, Stone grew concerned. Instead of escorting him down the familiar hallway to the interrogation room after he’d had his usual cold shower and bland morning meal, they took him a different way, down a corridor he’d never seen before.

  “No questions this morning?” he asked his guards, even though he wasn’t supposed to address them unless spoken to.

  “Quiet,” the guard said, using magic to shove him along. They didn’t bother immobilizing his arms anymore, and he didn’t try to escape—where would he go? If he was ever going to get out of here he’d need a plan, and so far none had presented itself.

  Their destination was a large, industrial-style kitchen. As the guard pushed open the double doors (again using magic), a solid wall of heat hit Stone, along with a strong odor of scorched oil and a concentrated overlay of the tasteless porridge the prisoners were fed. Several tan-clad prisoners moved around the various stations and counters, but they weren’t cooking; instead, Stone spotted some cleaning counters, some scrubbing floors, and others carrying large cans of rubbish. Three more guards, two at the near end and one at the far, kept a vigilant eye over the proceedings.

  “You’re working in here today,” one of Stone’s guards said.

  “Enjoy,” the other one said, with a nasty laugh. Both departed as one of the two kitchen guards approached him.

  An hour into the job, Stone had already determined this was the worst one yet—even worse than cleaning the bathrooms. At least the air had been chilly there, which made the hard physical work bearable. The kitchen, on the other hand, was swelteringly hot courtesy of two massive ovens on the far side. Stone was put to work scrubbing the cracked tile floor near one of these ovens, and by the time half an hour had passed he was drenched in sweat.

  “Keep scrubbing,” one of the guards ordered when he stopped to wipe his brow and catch his breath. “When you finish that section of floor you can have some water. Not before.”

  Stone returned to his task without a word, once again trying to check out mentally and perform the task by rote. “That section” was the entire side of the room—it would doubtless take him at least another two hours to finish it, probably longer. If his previous assignments had been any indication, the guards took sadistic pleasure in identifying any missed spots and forcing the prisoners to do them over.

  As he worked, he wondered why they hadn’t taken him for questioning again. Did they finally believe him
that he knew nothing more than he’d already told them? They hadn’t asked him anything else about his tattoo or magic in general, focusing mostly on his relationship with Harrison. Had they finally accepted that he didn’t have a relationship with Harrison? And if so, what then? Would he become just another forgotten member of the Dim prison workforce, destined to be driven until he died, like the poor sod a few days ago who’d collapsed in the laundry?

  There was only one small advantage to working in the kitchen, Stone discovered on his third day there: the guards didn’t seem to mind as much if the prisoners talked among themselves, as long as they kept it to a minimum and got their work done. They barely paid attention to the prisoners at all unless they weren’t doing their jobs, preferring to lean back in their chairs and chat with each other.

  Most of the time this didn’t matter, because each prisoner had his or her own work area and they didn’t get close enough to each other to talk. But Stone quickly realized that if he started scrubbing at one end of his section of the floor and finished at the opposite end, he’d end up only a few feet away from the prisoner assigned to the next section, a pale young man with scraggly blond hair and a perpetually hopeless expression.

  “How long have you been in here?” he asked the man when he got close enough that he could speak quietly.

  The man looked up, startled, and then returned to his scrubbing. “Huh?”

  “How long?” Stone repeated. “How long have you been here?”

  “I dunno. Long time.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tomba.” The young man’s suspicious gaze flicked toward the guard, then to Stone’s face, then back to his work.

  “I’m Stone. What did you do?”

  “Huh?”

  Stone wondered if his workmate truly was one of the Dim—and not in the magical sense—or if he’d simply been ground down by too much of the mind-numbing work and demoralizing conditions. “What did you do to get arrested?” he asked patiently.