Steel and Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  “That’s right.” He looked Stone up and down. “I’ve got my work cut out for me, it seems. Sit down—you need to eat before we can start, so we can talk while we do that.”

  Stone didn’t sit. “Where’s Harrison? I thought he was going to be training me. In magic, not in…this.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know where he is. But he asked me to do this, and he says you’ve agreed, so here we are. Please sit down—I’m sure you’re hungry after this morning.”

  “Yes, well, lugging rocks around for three hours will do that.” Stone dropped into the chair at Karol’s right. “I know I agreed to this and I’m not planning on backing out, but this is the oddest way to teach magic I’ve ever seen.”

  A door on the other side of the room opened, and another mechanical figure rolled in, pushing a cart. This one looked similar to Anzo, who waited outside the dining room. Efficiently it offloaded several plates, serving platters, and other items from the cart, then rolled off.

  “That’s not for me to judge—magic isn’t my area. I’m just doing what I was asked to do. Please, eat.” Karol indicated the table.

  Despite his suspicion, Stone didn’t need a second invitation. The plates and platters contained a combination of the familiar and the exotic: steak, steaming vegetables, rice, bread, all in abundance. Best of all, it smelled like whoever had prepared it had used actual spices. He filled up his plate and waited for Karol to do the same, then started in. “You produce all of this here?” he asked, pouring a glass of water from a sparkling carafe.

  “Most of it. Some of it’s imported from the farms outside Drendell and the other cities, and some I’m not sure where it comes from. But eat all you want—good meals are part of building you up.”

  The food was excellent, simple but exquisitely prepared. For a few minutes Stone concentrated on eating, but then he looked at Karol. “I suppose I should thank you for not snapping my neck like a twig back in Temolan.”

  The big man chuckled. “You were never in any danger. But you did a good job making it look convincing. It made it much easier to get you out after you were ‘dead.’”

  “I was told you were placed inside that prison. You aren’t a mage, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Bit dangerous, then, isn’t it? They could have killed you at any moment.”

  “They could have, true. But the prisons are where some of our best non-magical prospects are, so we need people on the inside to identify them.”

  “Prospects? You mean people who are brought back here?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you’re building some kind of hidden utopia.”

  Karol chuckled again. “Not even close. There’s nothing utopian about New Argana. We have as many squabbles and disagreements as any group of people. What we’re building here is a refuge—a place where magical and non-magical people can work together without any of the stupid prejudices you find in the rest of the world.”

  “And Harrison started this whole thing? Errin was telling me he’s in charge.”

  Karol considered, refilling his plate with vegetables. “That’s…not quite accurate. He’s not in charge, though he could be if he wanted to be, of course. Nobody’s going to oppose him. And nobody even bothers trying to tell him what to do.”

  “Why not? Would they be punished?” Stone remembered once again the way Harrison had killed a squad of survivalists back on Earth without even breaking a sweat, and without any hint of remorse.

  “Punished?” He snorted. “No. Where did you get an idea like that?”

  “Well, he’s clearly got a lot of power—I mean, look at this place.”

  “He does, no doubt about that. That doesn’t mean people—at least people here—are afraid of him. But he’s not interested in being in charge. All he wants to do is be left alone to work on his projects, do whatever he does, and keep this place protected and concealed from the rest of the world. The town outside the tower is pretty self-governing. As long as nobody reveals our existence to the Talented, he doesn’t care what they do.”

  “I see.” Stone wondered how much Harrison had told Karol about other worlds; since Kira had said she and Errin were the only ones here he’d told, Stone decided not to say anything about it either. Instead, he gestured around him. “So, he built this tower? How does that work? He’s just one man. Did he have help?”

  “Nobody knows. The tower was here when the settlement started. They tell me it has something to do with magic, but I don’t get involved in that. Makes my head hurt.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Many years. A long time before I got here five years ago, but there were people who’ve been here a lot longer who weren’t here at the beginning either.”

  Hmm, Stone thought. So either Harrison was older than he looked, or time worked much differently here. Or both.

  “Anyway,” Karol said, “finish up and we’ll get started. You can go back to your room and change into exercise clothes afterward, and we’ll start with some easy warmups while lunch settles down.”

  Stone sighed. At least it wasn’t toting rocks.

  After he got changed, Anzo took him to yet another room inside the tower. The place was odd—the hallways were all the same, with the slate-colored carpet and gray walls, and none of the doors were labeled, so it was difficult to navigate without the little rolling construct’s help. He wondered if Harrison had designed it that way, to make it hard for anyone who got inside to find their way around. He wasn’t even sure how many teleport pads the place had. It definitely reminded him more than a bit of the Obsidian back in Vegas, though. Maybe Harrison had borrowed the hotel’s plans when designing the Nexus.

  He stopped in the doorway, staring in amazement when Anzo opened it. “Bloody hell…”

  It was a gymnasium. Not just something hastily cobbled together from Fifties-era tech, but a modern-day, fully stocked gym. Stone hadn’t spent much time in such places, but he recognized various machines, a free-weight area, and a large open floor with different types of apparatus—thick ropes, medicine balls, mats, and similar items—arrayed around it. As with every other room he’d seen so far in the tower, one entire wall was a window looking out over the landscape; another wall was a mirror.

  Karol was already there, consulting something on a clipboard on the other side of the room. “Ah,” he said, looking up. “There you are. Come on in and let’s get started. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

  “This is…incredible,” Stone said. “I didn’t think you had this kind of thing here.”

  “We have all kinds of things here.”

  Stone approached, taking a closer look at the machines as he did. To his surprise, he recognized some of the labels on them. This stuff is from Earth. Apparently Harrison was importing more things than even most of the residents here might believe.

  “Right, then. Let’s get on with this.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, Karol put Stone through a series of grueling exercises—everything from lifting weights to cardio conditioning to calisthenics to techniques that seemed like a combination of yoga and martial arts and left Stone’s muscles screaming for relief.

  Once, while they took a brief water break, Stone sagged against one of the machines and swiped a towel across his brow. “I think,” he said, between breaths, “I’ve just alienated every muscle in my body.”

  Karol chuckled. “You probably did. You don’t get much exercise normally, do you?”

  “I run,” he protested.

  “Well, that’s a start, I guess. Don’t worry, though—you’ll see improvement fast if you do what we tell you.”

  “I’m beginning to think that healing machine in my room is a curse, not a blessing.” He was already anticipating getting back to use it again. “I won’t even be able to claim pulled muscles as an excuse, will I?”

  “No. But it’s also why you won’t have to do this as long.”

  “That’s something, I suppose.” Nobody, as yet, had
told him how long he would have to do this. “Do you have any idea how long this will be going on? I can’t stay here forever—I need to get back to…where I come from. I’ve got obligations.”

  “That will be up to you,” Karol told him. “And Trevor, of course.”

  Stone tightened his hand on the towel. “I think we’ll need to have a discussion, he and I.”

  27

  More time passed, and Stone began to suspect he wasn’t to get his wish.

  Every day began the same way: an alarm awakened him at dawn, after which he paused to check whether his magic had returned before rising from bed. When each day brought the same disappointing revelation that it had not, he set about his routine: breakfast, a morning filled with various unconventional exercises directed by Kira, lunch, afternoons with Karol at the gym, dinner, a welcome session with the magical healing machine, and early bedtime. In between he interspersed several long, refreshing showers, during which he tried his best not to think too hard about what he’d gotten himself into. That way lay madness, or at least failure.

  Sometimes he broke up the routine by taking long runs around New Argana, usually outside the town where he could be alone with his thoughts. During the rare times when one of his instructors (bloody taskmasters, as he’d begun to think of them) gave him a couple hours’ break and he wasn’t too exhausted, he went into town to look in the shops, grab a drink at one of the bars, or chat with some of the locals. He deliberately kept such conversations light and mostly content-free after discovering that attempts to ask more probing questions were met with brisk changes of subject.

  Kira and Karol weren’t much more helpful in that regard—it wasn’t that they didn’t answer his questions, but rather that their answers raised more of his curiosity than they satisfied. Finally, he just gave up and focused on the routine, making a mark on a notepad next to his bed each night before he fell into it. This couldn’t go on too much longer, right?

  In all that time, Harrison was nowhere to be found. Stone had not seen him since the night they’d made their agreement, which added significantly to his growing stress and frustration. When he asked Kira, Errin, or Karol where he might be found, all of them claimed not to know.

  “You have to understand about Trevor,” Errin told him when he stopped by her house on one of his runs. “He does what he does, and he doesn’t answer to anybody. You get used to it. He’ll turn up when he thinks you’re ready for him, but right now he’s probably off dealing with some other issue that has nothing to do with you.” She offered him an encouraging smile, looking him up and down. “Don’t worry—it’s not that he’s ignoring you. He’s like this all the time. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and he’ll show up eventually. It looks like the exercise plan is working, anyway.”

  “Brilliant,” Stone muttered. She was right—he already had more energy and was certain he was growing stronger—but none of that mattered if he couldn’t use magic. Harrison might be trying to turn him into a gym rat, but it wasn’t going to work.

  Around the two-week mark, the routine changed. The sessions with Karol remained mostly the same, but the day after he finally finished the wall Kira had him build (completed, the thing was five levels deep in rock and nearly thirty feet long), she greeted him near a strange apparatus she’d constructed near it.

  “What’s this?” he asked, eyeing what looked like a metal frame built over a large, deep tub.

  “Your assignment for the day.” She nodded at it. “You’re going to hang up there as long as you can.”

  “What the hell?” He moved forward and peered into the tub. Water filled it almost to the brim, to a depth of about five feet. Dipping his hand in revealed the water to be ice-cold. “You’re having me on, right?”

  “Not at all. This is the next stage of your training. Physical endurance combined with willpower. I’ll remove the tub in half an hour. If you can remain there that long, you won’t get a dunking. Otherwise…”

  He glared at her. “Harrison told you do this? Where the hell is he, anyway? I want to talk to him.”

  “He’s not here. Haven’t seen him for days. He left word you should start the endurance training as soon as you finished the wall. Unless,” she added with a sly sideways glance, “you’re ready to give up.”

  Anger rose, but Stone drove it down. That was what Harrison wanted—for him to give up—and he’d be damned if he’d give the man the satisfaction. “No,” he muttered. “I’m not ready to give up. Let’s get on with it.”

  She used magic to levitate him up, and held him there until he’d grasped the bar and indicated he was ready. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” she said. “Good luck.”

  The first day, he lasted fifteen minutes, the last few owing more to sheer stubborn willpower than physical strength. Kira, who’d perhaps been watching him discreetly from a distance, showed up shortly after and sent him to dry off. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” was all she said.

  The next day, he made twenty minutes. “This is rubbish,” he told her through chattering teeth when she returned. “It’s not training—it’s sadism.”

  “Want to give up? You can, you know. Any time you want.”

  “I’m not giving up. And you can tell Harrison that for me.”

  She merely smiled in that maddening way of hers and tossed him a towel.

  It was a full week before he managed the entire thirty minutes, using a combination of more stubborn willpower, deep meditation techniques, and good old-fashioned anger. By the time Kira turned up that day, his arms shook until he thought they’d never be still again, and hurt so much he was sure they’d fall off before he could get to the sweet relief of the healing machine.

  “There,” he growled, dropping to the ground after she slid the tub free. “Done, damn you.”

  “Nice job,” was all she said.

  It went on like that for the next week, with Kira coming up with increasingly more difficult and frustrating exercises. She had him climbing cliff walls (which he found he was good at), walking tightropes (which he wasn’t) and running until he couldn’t manage another step—followed by urging him to keep going anyway. Through it all he persisted—grumbling to himself all the while about what he’d say to Harrison when he saw him, but he persisted. Every night he made another tick-mark on his notepad before falling into bed; it had become a rote thing by now, and he’d stopped counting them because doing so made him angrier.

  Whatever Harrison was up to, he’d just about had his fill of it.

  28

  On day thirty, he finally had enough.

  It had been a day like every other: Kira had sent him out on a multi-mile run around New Argana and its surrounding area, and afterward, following the usual substantial lunch, Karol had done his best to reduce him to a lump of quivering muscle with his increasingly brutal workouts. Karol himself wasn’t brutal, of course—he remained his usual amiable, cheery self—but by the time Stone had trudged back to his suite and availed himself of the healing machine, his frustration and despair at the futility of all this had reached a higher boiling point than it ever had before.

  Savagely, he made another tick mark on his pad, then paused to count them for the first time in a couple of weeks.

  Thirty.

  He’d been carrying on this charade for thirty days, with no sign of Harrison. The man hadn’t even made an appearance—not at the Nexus, not at Errin’s place, not anywhere in town. For all Stone knew he could be off gallivanting on another dimension while his would-be apprentice killed himself trying to fulfill his pair of taskmasters’ increasingly impossible tasks.

  Instead of going to bed, he stumped out to the front room and poured himself a substantial shot from one of the bottles at his well-stocked bar. He grabbed the first one he spotted, not caring what it was. He’d been mostly avoiding alcohol except for an occasional nightcap since he’d started his training, but tonight none of that mattered. Nothing mattered. For all he knew, Harrison would keep him at this for the nex
t six months before pronouncing him ready for the next stage.

  If he ever planned to do it at all.

  Stone didn’t stop at the single shot. He tossed it back and poured another, glaring at the starlit view out the window without seeing it. When he finished that one, he poured still another. If Kira or Karol wanted to complain about his inevitable hangover the next day, let them bloody try.

  “I have had just about enough of this!” Stone snapped aloud at his reflection in the glass. “I haven’t seen Harrison since we started this whole charade—I’m starting to think he’s been having me on this whole time, trying to see how much of this ridiculous treatment I’d put up with before I gave it up. Anzo!” he yelled, slamming the empty glass down. “Where the hell are you?”

  “I am here,” the construct’s pleasant voice responded from the other side of the room. “Is there something you require?”

  “Damn bloody right there is. I want you to take me to Harrison. Right now. I don’t want any excuses, either. Just do it. Now.”

  “Mr. Harrison is—”

  “I don’t give a damn if Mr. Harrison is in the middle of an orgy with a manatee, three elephants, and a racehorse! You take me to him right now! Got it?”

  “Yes, sir. Follow me, please.”

  Stone blinked. He hadn’t expected that to work. Was Harrison actually here, then? He half-thought Anzo would tell him it couldn’t fulfill the request because the man was off in some other city, or on Earth, or on another dimension entirely. “Er—all right, then.” He hurried to catch up, weaving only slightly.

  Anzo led him down a familiar hall to a teleport pad. “This way,” it said, rolling onto the pad.

  Stone joined it. “Where is he?”

  The view shimmered, then reformed on another hallway. “He is in the main workroom.”

  “Wait—he’s right here in the building?” Stone looked around, but the décor didn’t provide any clue—like all the other halls in this place, this one had the same gray walls and slate carpet. He’s here, and he can’t even be arsed to stop by and check whether they’ve killed me yet with all this exercise rubbish? Damn, but the man was maddening.