by Anton Strout
“Why not?” I asked. “If it’s a science, as you’ve said, why wouldn’t it be accumulated in the same manner?”
Caleb shrugged. “It’s a science to a point,” he said. “It’s still arcana, after all, and the people who practice it get freaky proprietary over their secrets.”
“What about all that stuff the Libra Concordia has gathered? That’s more than enough to fill a library. It’s enough to fill that church downtown, at least.”
Caleb shook his head. “The information caged off there looks like a lot, yes,” he said. “But it’s nothing comprehensive. All bits and pieces, really, accumulated over centuries, only a fraction of the secret knowledge of the unknown world. It’s an impressive collection, sure, but consider the mission of the Libra Concordia. They’re trying to keep that knowledge secret from the world. It’s not like they have enough knowledge to do anything with it. Unless, say, there was an industrious freelancer willing to piece it all together for themselves.”
“And here I thought you were going to that church just to do some community service for the Lord,” I said.
Caleb gave me a get-real look, then set back to mixing the contents of his vials. “There’s a reason the magical world wants to stay hidden, Alexandra,” he said, “and it’s done a fair job of it, if you ask me. Think about it. It took the Libra Concordia centuries to accumulate the small amount of knowledge they do have, and that’s only a tiny percentage from around the planet.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said, impressed. “I’ve spent most of my time just trying to wrap my mind around my family’s legacy, which to you is just a small piece of a grander puzzle, isn’t it?”
Caleb nodded.
“Before I knew about the Libra Concordia,” he said, “I studied up on what I could find out about your great-great-grandfather, his work back in the old country.
“Several centuries ago, the world was a much bigger place, and it was easier to be hidden away in it. Scattered towns and villages, kingdoms that only talked to each other at wartime. And arcana was hidden then because religious zealotry would have condemned it. But reputations could be earned over time, especially if those arcane powers were put to good use for the sake of a village and its safety. Alexander Belarus was such a figure, and, yes, it did indeed earn him a reputation.”
“Sadly, it also earned him the attention of a local lord mad for power,” I said. “Kejetan the Accursed.”
“Did it, now?” Caleb asked, a surprised smile on his face. “I hadn’t read of that actual name.”
I nodded.
“And Accursed?” he continued, his smile widening. He gave a pleasant laugh. “I mean, with a title like that, I guess you have to go into the mad lord business, right?”
“Don’t be so flip,” I said, anger suddenly rising in me. “Enslaving my great-great-grandfather ended up costing the lord his only son. Stanis is all that remains of him, and he is not cut from the same cloth as his father, believe me.” I calmed myself for a moment before pointing to his hands. “Maybe we should get back to work.”
“Oh, right,” he said, and went back to the vials in his hands, mixing a drop here to a drop there, and every so often holding it up to the light once again to check its color.
Marshall had reorganized since last I had been here. When I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I searched around the rest of the back room, checking shelf after shelf of painted miniature figures. Most looked to be about an inch or two high, either plastic or metal, but along one section of wall I finally found several of the troll-like creatures I had spied a while back that seemed to actually be carved from stone. I pulled one down.
“Only at a hard-core game store can you find everything for your wizarding and witching ways,” I said.
Caleb resealed all but one of the vials before returning the rest to their slots inside his coat on the chair. He pulled another vial from the bandolier there, holding it out in front of me.
“Recognize it?” he asked.
Seeing the dark red liquid swirling around in the clear plastic tube, I raised my eyebrows and gave a tight-lipped smile. “Of course I do,” I said. “I should, anyway. It probably came from my family’s private stock.”
“Kimiya,” he said. “But no, you are incorrect. This isn’t stolen. This is my attempt at the reverse-engineered home brew.” He held up the other mixture. “And this—this is a bit of a transformative binding solution. Not all that much by itself, but . . .”
He pulled the stopper from the Kimiya, tipped it to the other vial, and let a single drop from it fall into the other. Caleb stoppered it back up, slipped it into his coat, then swirled the new mixture in the remaining vial. He held his hand out to me, and I passed the stone troll over to him.
Caleb laid the tiny stone monster on the empty chair his coat hung over and poured the concoction over the figure until it was saturated, the ritual beginning to look a bit like what I had gone through in creating Bricksley.
“I believe I know this part,” I said, picking up the figure and lowering it into the maze spread out on Marshall’s gaming table.
I raised my hand and stared down my arm at the wet figure standing there among the walls of what looked to be a fairly realistic miniature dungeon. I had no idea if sighting the figure between the pointer and pinky finger of my raised hand actually helped, but at the very least it gave me a focal point as I reached out with my will for control of the figure.
The connection snapped to—like holding the object in an invisible version of my hand—and I tried to will it to move through the maze on the table.
The tiny figure shot forward, slamming into the dungeon walls, knocking them so hard that one section fell from the table, and another flew into the air across the room before hitting the wall. The alchemical mix threw great power into even the simplest of my actions, the figure responding to the smallest amount of pressure I put on it, making it hard to use finesse in managing my control over it.
I forced the troll to stop near one of the metal figures in the maze, a short, bearded character with a stocky build carrying what looked like a giant hammer. A dwarf. I had to see if I could brew a little combat there.
My creature lifted its arms high over its head to smash the other one, and I brought them down on it. Rather than simply knocking the bearded figure over, my troll crushed the metal of it down into the faux stone floor of the maze, but the force of my will didn’t end there. The sharp crack of wood came from beneath the dungeon. The coffee table split in two, the figures and stone maze collapsing in on themselves as its contents slid to the floor at the center of the break.
“Shit,” I said, losing total control of the little figure, and it rampaged off through the rubble, crashing and smashing its way through the pile.
“I got this,” Caleb said, sliding another vial from the coat. He dropped to his knees and held it over the still-swinging troll before pouring the contents onto it, then drank from the vial himself. His face drew up in concentration as he extended his hand out in front of the tiny stone troll. It continued on along its violent path, but it slowed as the stone of it seized up, toppling over inert into his palm.
Caleb got up off his knees, his eyes staying on the figure, and presented it to me.
I marveled at it. “You’ve got control of it now?”
“For the moment,” he said.
I reached for the figure, but before I could take it from Caleb, its form began to shake and twist in his hand. It exploded as I was pulling my hand back from it, bits of stone shooting against my knuckles, but thankfully not breaking the skin.
Caleb clutched his hand with his other one.
“You said you had control of it!” I said, prying his fingers open to look at the damage. Luckily, Caleb had pulled away in time, and his hand remained in one piece.
“Controlling things are a bit more of a Spellm
ason thing than alchemy,” he said.
I looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
Caleb pulled his hands away, dusting them off against each other. “With alchemy, I can affect the world by transforming things on an arcane level,” he said, “but they’re all momentary modifications.”
“Like when you were turned to stone in my great-great-grandfather’s guild hall,” I offered.
“Exactly,” he said. “Or I can transform other materials, but it’s nothing more than chemicals, magic, and science. And much of it isn’t permanent. I don’t make or control things. But from what little I’ve been able to read from the notes the Libra Concordia have found from Alexander, I have been able to try my hand at what you’d probably call a rough version of Spellmasonry.”
“That’s still pretty impressive,” I said. “I mean, given my resources and an entire library of books, the only stable creature I’ve been able to make is a glorified brick. You’re a natural.”
Caleb shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I have a real handle on mixing and alchemy, but this? I don’t have the finesse for it. It’s like the stone is constantly fighting me with a will of its own.”
“I know, right?” I exclaimed, way more excited than I expected myself to be finally talking shop with someone. “It happens to me all the time.”
“If I had to guess,” Caleb said, “Spellmasonry seems to be more of a contest of will over matter more so than the recipes and formulas of the magic-in-a-bottle of alchemy. It’s why I have trouble dealing with the will of the stone.”
I nodded. “I don’t think it’s a will all its own, though.”
“No?”
I pulled out my notebook, flipping through to a section of research I’d been compiling.
“I’ve been having the worst time getting anything I try to control to stay living, anything that’s larger than a brick, anyway. I can’t seem to fill my creations with my will, and they stop working. There’s a suggestion in Alexander’s notes that there are lingering spirits in this world that want a body to occupy, and they don’t care what form it is in. Again, my one success with it is brick-sized, so it’s not like I’m a master of anything.”
“You’re one up on me,” he said. “I haven’t tried animating much of anything, just because the few times I have, it’s been such a struggle to keep control, and I’m only dealing with a finite amount of time that I can keep it going before one of my concoctions run out. Besides, if it did actually work in any sustained way, I’m afraid of what might happen. Like if I left a construct active with something else ‘steering the ship,’ you know?”
I smiled, a wave of relief filling me just hearing I wasn’t alone in my own struggles with this. “I absolutely know.”
“Probably why I stick to alchemy,” he said with a grim smile, looking down at the broken table between us.
The curtain across the door leading into the store flew open, and Marshall stormed into the back room. His eyes went immediately to the two pieces of the caved-in table on the floor, and he shook his head.
“I thought I heard a crash, followed by an explosion,” he said, dropping to the ground by what remained of his gaming table. He scooped up tiny pieces of wall and figures from the pile there. “What the hell? Do you know how long it took me to build that dungeon?”
I gave a pained smile. “Sorry, Marsh.”
Rory came through the curtain next and saw Marshall kneeling there. She turned to Caleb and me, her face annoyed, and she started a slow, measured clap.
“That didn’t take long,” she said. “Good thing I had bet on chaos ensuing in under half an hour.”
“Things just . . . got out of control.”
Caleb laughed. “You can say that again. So much for my reverse engineering of the Kimiya. If I had used it on myself, maybe I would have exploded, too.”
“It’s progress,” I said.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said.
“Not just that,” I said. “I’ve still got the issue of how to make and control an army of stone men to deal with Kejetan.”
“We’ll figure that out, too,” he said, taking my hands in his, giving them a comforting squeeze. “Together.”
It felt terribly reassuring coming from him. I wanted to believe him and was slowly convincing myself of it when Marshall ahemed loudly next to us.
I turned to him. “I’m really sorry,” I said, snapping out of my moment of hopefulness, once more taking in the destruction Caleb and I had caused. “I’ll cover the damage.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” he said, looking up at me, upset. “That was our deal, remember? Not even twenty minutes old! The ink would still be wet!” His eyes fell back to the pile in front of him and ran his hand along the wood sticking out from beneath the maze and figures.
“I said I’ll cover it,” I repeated.
“That’s not the point,” he said, snapping. “This was my original gaming table. I’ve had it since I was seven. My precious.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, but when no answer came from Marshall, I turned to Caleb. “Maybe this isn’t the best place for this.”
I hesitated for a moment as I pondered an alternative, walking over to the coat over the chair, grabbing it, and handing it to him.
“Maybe we should go somewhere a little more practical,” I continued, looking down at Marshall still picking through the mess on the floor. “Can I help you clean up?” I asked.
“Just go,” Marshall muttered. I didn’t feel I could argue.
Caleb took his coat and slipped it on. Rory looked at the two of us in silence as I headed for the curtained door, grabbing my fellow alchemist by his hand and dragging him along behind me despite the reluctance I felt in him.
“Come on,” I said to him. “I think Marshall may need a little time to mourn.”
Thirteen
Alexandra
Outside of Rory and Marshall, I hadn’t really brought many people into the confines of my great-great-grandfather’s art studio and library, and certainly not since any of the building’s trashings.
It had always been my own sacred space, even now after suffering at the hands of the new and darker Stanis. It still brought me comfort, and after pissing off Rory and Marshall at Roll for Initiative, I definitely needed a hit of that. And while normally I would have felt strange taking someone there, I found escorting Caleb into the confines of the damaged Belarus Building surprisingly comforting as well.
We came up the fire escape as I had since I was a little girl, and I threw open what remained of the French doors leading in from the terrace. The right one twisted off its hinge and fell to the stone of the terrace, several of its glass panels shattering.
“Ta-da!” I said, weakly, going in before I could further embarrass myself.
“Where are we?” Caleb asked, coming in behind me, the crunch of his footfalls echoing in the open space. “It looks like you brought me to a condemned building. Is this a crack den?”
“Home, sweet home,” I said, ignoring him and stepping across the library through the debris of broken statues and puzzle boxes. “What’s left of it, anyway.”
I slowed and turned to Caleb as he stopped in his tracks, realizing where he was.
“This is it,” he said, marveling. “This is actually Alexander’s library and studio.”
“Give the man a kewpie doll,” I said.
Caleb looked around, whistling.
“You really should clean more,” he said, picking up the base of one of the broken statues. Part of whatever it had been still had the figure’s legs attached to it. He ran his hand around the edge of its pedestal. “I recognize this.”
“You do?” I asked. “For real? I couldn’t identify that statue by just its legs, and I’ve studied my great-great-grandfather’s work most of my life!”
“Not the statue as such,” he said. Caleb held the base up, tracing the octagonal shape of it. The winged Belarus sigil with our initial was carved onto the bottom of the piece. “This design is stamped all over the guild hall.”
“This is where my great-great-grandfather did the greater part of his art and architecture work,” I said, “and this is the library where he accumulated much of his arcane knowledge.”
Caleb was like a kid at Disney World, but all that stopped for a moment, his face becoming skeptical. “Why did you bring me here?” he asked.
“I would think you’d love to be here,” I said.
“Well, yes,” he said. “Of course. But it’s awfully trusting of you, don’t you think? I mean, I know me pretty well, and I certainly wouldn’t trust me around all this.”
“First of all, I think if push came to shove and you tried anything, I could probably take you,” I said, meeting his eyes, my face serious.
“Oh really?” he asked, a half smile creeping on to his face. “I don’t know. As a freelancer, I do pride myself on the quality of my work.”
“A fair point,” I said. “But you are standing in Belarus Central, so I think I might have the advantage here. Besides, if I’m to take your promise to help me seriously, you and I have to start trusting one another, so this is me putting my best foot forward. Don’t make me regret it.”
“I’ll try not to,” he said.
I wanted to trust the sincerity in his eyes, but I knew that might simply be a tool of his trade, the easily told lies of someone who most days worked simply for the highest bidder.
Caleb moved to one of the overturned bookcases, running his hand along it.
“I’d hate for you to get my blood on any of this stuff,” he said. “You know, you could have brought your bodyguard and Sir Nerdsalot.”
I move to one of the still-upright stools by one of the art tables, sitting on it and spinning around, my hands resting on the front of the seat.