by Anton Strout
There was little hope in determining the point and purpose of much that was here, not without some kind of reference material, but I slogged on through the aisles for half an hour or so before something on the shelves caught my eye.
“Caleb!” I called out to the next aisle as quietly as I could, and he came running.
“Find something?” he asked.
I raised my light, shining it on the small, sculpted building that sat on the shelf.
Caleb reached for it, pulling it from under several books that were leaning against it.
“This is where we are,” he said. “It’s a scale model of this very church.”
“This isn’t a scale model of this church,” I said, taking it from him.
Caleb eyed me with suspicion. “It looks like one to me,” he said.
“It’s a puzzle box,” I corrected. “One of my great-great-grandfather’s, to be precise. What it is doing here apart from the rest we kept at the Belarus Building is a mystery.”
“Maybe Desmond Locke took it,” he said.
“I’ve never seen it before. It must have gone missing from the collection before I was born.”
“It’s pretty elaborate,” Caleb said, still staring at the miniature in wonder.
I looked up at him, a little perturbed. “All Alexander Belarus knew how to make were elaborate things. You’ve met Stanis, right?”
“I’m just saying,” he said. “As far as nonmagical things go, if that’s a puzzle box, it’s also an amazing miniature architectural wonder.”
I ignored him, continuing to look it over. By its heft alone, I could judge that the miniature of the church was itself actually comprised of stone. I doubted that simply trying to smash it on the ground was going to make it divulge its secrets to us.
“We had lots of these in his art studio,” I said. “Nothing quite like this, mind you, but I had worked my way through all those puzzles over time, so hopefully this one won’t take me too long to figure out.”
As I set to examining the miniature church closer, Caleb moved past me back out into the main aisle, looking around.
“The sooner, the better,” he said. “Not sure how long we have before someone discovers we’re down here.”
“Puzzling as fast as I can,” I said, and turned the church over and over in my hands.
Alexander might have been a Spellmason, but the core of that practice was his artistry and, in this specific case, his flair for architecture. The real trick of his work was in knowing what to look for. My great-great-grandfather was a logical man, and if you paid attention to the things he had created—arcane or not—there was a sense to them. With that in mind, I set the church back down on the shelf to ponder its mysteries.
I tapped at it on all sides, hoping to hear a hollow part, but the damned thing seemed as solid a piece of stone as it looked.
“Damn Alexander and his old-world craftsmanship,” Caleb said, shaking his fist at the miniature church.
Think, Lexi, think!
“Craftsmanship . . .” I repeated, the word striking a chord in me. “Whether in miniature or not, the principles of architecture should hold true.”
“Principles of architecture?”
“Things such as the classical-ideals stuff that sprung out of the Roman Empire, like the arch.” I pointed at the one over the door of the tiny church. “What’s the most foundational item in supporting a structure like this church? If you wanted to build something tall out of stone, it had to be sturdy.” I spun the model around and pointed to another arch. “Tensile stress of open space is taken up by compressional stress.”
“Compressional?”
I spun the model again, pointing to another arch, dragging my finger to the top of it, pointing at the stone there.
“Keystones,” I said, turning the church back to its front face.
I ran my thumb over the keystone above the main doors of the church and it felt solid to my touch, but when I pressed hard against it, the tiny keystone slid inward with a click. I rotated the church, moving from arch to arch, activating all the rest of the keystones I could find. The last two were along the top of the steeple, and once pressed, the base of the model came free, sliding out and away from under it.
“Got it?” Caleb asked.
“Maybe,” I said, examining it. I pried the top of the base open from a notch at its center, finding what I was looking for, the familiar scrolled Belarus B etched into the cover of the book.
Caleb reached past me and grabbed the book from within the base, struggling to lift it in one hand. “Heavy,” he said. “It’s stone.”
“To keep it safe from the ravages of time,” I said, grabbing it back from him. “Like my great-great-grandfather’s master spell book. I can take care of that later.”
“We should go,” he said.
I agreed, fixing the by-then-empty base back under the church until I felt it lock into place. I slid it back on the shelf, leaning the books against it as best I remembered them, hoping I was leaving it the way we had found it.
Caleb grabbed my hand and pulled me down the aisle after him, gaining speed. Now that we had had the luck of finding what we had come for, neither of us wanted to press it further by staying a moment longer than we had to. Halfway up the main aisle, the gates ahead slammed shut of their own accord. I ran to them, pulling once more at the iron handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Is there a password to this?” I asked.
“Probably,” Caleb said, looking around. “Damned if I know it, though.”
“Do something!” I shouted. I shook the gate, the rattling of it echoing through the basement of the church. I didn’t care about the noise it made now, but only because another sound caught my ear—the burbling of water behind us. I turned and looked back past Caleb in time to see the stoup along the back wall erupt in an explosion of water.
Caleb spun around. “Oh hell,” he said. “I really hate those Witch and Bitch hags.”
What I thought must be a geyser bubbled up out of the stoup all the way to the ceiling before I realized it was something more than just that. An actual form took shape within it, resembling something that reminded me of one of those Chinese parade dragons. “What is that?”
“Not sure,” Caleb said, grabbing my arm as the creature charged us. He pulled me away from the gate after him as he darted down one of the other aisles. “Let’s not find out, shall we?”
I agreed wholeheartedly, running after him just as the creature hit the iron gate. It slowed as it passed through it, the solidity of its body working its way around the bars, but its head was already rearing around to come back through for a return trip. Caleb jerked my arm as he turned down a side aisle, and the creature fell out of my line of sight.
“We need another way out,” he said, coming to a stop. I slammed into him, turning to find ourselves at the back wall once more, with the broken stoup in front of us. The creature’s telltale sloshing noise, coming from somewhere behind us, grew louder with each passing second.
Was I supposed to fight the damn thing? How the hell did you fight water?
And I didn’t dare defend myself in the bowels of this unfamiliar church by rearranging any parts of the walls or ceiling to protect us. We were in the basement now—most of the architectural structures around us were probably crucial to keeping the building standing. The last thing I wanted to do was magic the wrong stone out of place and pull the entire building down on top of us.
The floor near the stoup, however, was another story. If there was water coming in, there was also a source for it, one that might be a way out. A mass of pipes leading away from the stoup drilled down into the floor, and I set my will against several floor slabs that lay just in front of them.
I breathed out the words of power once more, the weight of the ancient stones straining my will as I forced them up and
out of the floor where they had sat joined for centuries. I rolled the bunch of them off to the side as I pushed my will into the stones beneath those, feeling the shift and grind of the ground beneath us as I did so. Dust and dirt fell away from the stones as they came fully free, and I tore them up out of the earth, feeling a bit of hope when a waft of air rose up out of the open hole.
“Get in,” I said, peering down into the darkness below. Light danced along a hint of water below, but the noxious smell of trash and something more foul arose, driving Caleb back as he approached.
“Is that . . . ?”
“Don’t argue,” I shouted. “Just get in!”
Caleb still looked hesitant, but the sound of the water creature was closer than ever. I didn’t bother to turn around, opting instead for shoving Caleb down into the hole before jumping in after him.
Once through, the light was not nearly as bad as I thought, allowing me to see Caleb crumple into the stream of sewage below us right before I landed on him. My boots caught him in the middle of his back, driving him fully underwater, which on the plus side allowed me to keep standing. I stepped off him onto the floor of the tunnel and stumbled away as Caleb resurfaced.
His hair was matted to his head, and he gasped for breath, using all of his energy to stand as quickly as he could, but even so, he was drenched in sewage. He looked ill, his eyes wide, and his mouth fighting not to gag.
“Are you kidding me?” he shouted. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m sorry!” I shouted back. “What did you want me to do?”
“Not dump me into a river of sewage, for starters—”
Caleb didn’t get to finish his sentence.
The water creature poured down through the hole above us like a concentrated tidal wave. It splashed beneath the surface of the murky water and disappeared, the only movement that of the running sewage.
“I don’t know about you,” Caleb said, “but I don’t plan on drowning in a river of shit. You might want to get your spell book out.”
Caleb didn’t have to ask twice; my hands were already fumbling for my notebook as the stream of sewage erupted with the splash of the rising, swirling creature. The clear form of its body was now a dark and chunky mix, which I didn’t care to think about, but I’d be damned if I’d let that thing get ahold of me, especially in that form. The real question was what was I supposed to do?
“A little help here,” I called out while looking for anything helpful in my notes. “Liquid really isn’t my forte.”
The creature lunged for Caleb, and rather than trying to avoid it, he pushed forward, lunging through it. There was resistance in its body, but Caleb came through the other side of it wet but otherwise unharmed. The same could not be said of the creature, which fell into two pieces. As the two pieces of the monster fought to rejoin themselves, Caleb held up a vial filled with something gray.
“Liquid isn’t really your forte?” he asked, repeating me while upending the vial, the powdery concoction pouring out of it into the creature. “Unless it’s liquid stone.”
The color of its form shifted from its addition, and when I reached out with my power, I felt it connect to the writhing creature in front of me. The monster lunged, but I could feel the presence of stone growing within it as the gray of its form grew darker and darker. My will lashed out, and what had become a stone creature fell to my command, and I slowed it, and to my surprise, the mass solidified, crashing into the bottom of the tunnel. It shattered into several sections as it settled there, the twisted, tortured features of its solid face sticking up out of the sewage at me.
Caleb held up the emptied vial, tapping the last few flakes out of it.
“What was that?” I asked, unable to suppress a shiver.
“Mostly just concrete,” he said.
I looked at the broken length of the twisted creature. “That vial didn’t hold that much concrete.”
Caleb slipped the empty vial inside his coat and shook his head in disappointment at me. When he spoke, there was anger in his words. “See? It’s just that kind of linear, literal thinking just like upstairs with the stone that is holding you back,” he said. “Sure, I get it. You carve things. They’re finite, tangible . . . but alchemy isn’t about size or proportion all the time. You see a single vial of concrete. You know what I see as an alchemist? A bit of concrete mixed with some quick-spreading Kimiya that accelerates growth.” He shook his head, then slapped me on the shoulder as he walked past me. “You need to get that kind of thinking out of your head.”
Despite what I had just accomplished, I felt tremendously stupid. I stared at the stone-still creature a moment longer as the sounds of Caleb’s splashing away down the tunnel rose behind me. Turning, I ran to catch up, careful not to fall.
“I’m still learning,” I protested. “Caleb, you have to understand. So much of what I can do is literally textbook—notes from Alexander—but there’s no school for this. You’re the only other practitioner I know!”
“Lucky me,” he said, softening a bit. “And look at all this quality time we’re getting to spend together reeking of sewage.”
“Maybe this Witch and Bitch club can help us with making another gargoyle,” I suggested, trying to ignore the smells all around us. “They’re freelancers, after all. They did some work for Desmond Locke. Why not us?”
Caleb stopped and spun around to face me. “No!” he shouted.
“Well, why not?”
Caleb looked like he was biting his tongue as he composed himself, and I waited, with more patience than I expected to have considering I was knee deep in a river of filth.
“First of all,” he said, “I’m the freelancer you need to be working with. Do you really want to work with some group whose security system you just defeated?”
“That was more you than me,” I said.
Caleb sighed, running his fingers through his hair before he realized how gross it was and gave up. “It was both of us,” he said. “We work well together. I don’t want to bring in outsiders when I know we can do this ourselves. You’ll learn quickly that the fewer people you get involved in something, the less chance of other people’s messing it up.”
All this talk of us working together, it was almost romantic. Again, if not for where we were standing.
“Okay,” I said, holding up my newfound secret book of Alexander’s. “We have this to work from and a bunch of test gargoyle subjects to animate and all that, so no witches for now.”
I started sloshing my way toward him. “But I would like to know more about this Witch and Bitch club,” I added. “We might have defeated their sentry, but we didn’t have an easy time of it.”
Caleb looked down at his clothes in disgust and turned away, heading off down the sewer tunnel.
“Oh, I plan on seeing them again,” he said. “And when I do? I’m going to really give them something to bitch about.”
“Tough words for a guy covered in shit,” I said, hoping this tunnel actually led the hell out of the sewer system before I found myself having to fight mutant turtles of the teenage variety.
Caleb did not seem amused by my comment. “If we succeed in animating another gargoyle, I may have to borrow it for a bit,” he said. “Call it a vengeance loaner.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said. I couldn’t muster the strength for vengeance just then. I wasn’t even sure if I could muster it to shower before collapsing from exhaustion.
I just hoped I didn’t collapse while I was still down here.
Twenty
Stanis
Time had not always been kind to the copper of the large female statue that stood towering over what the humans called Liberty Island. Now, standing atop it, it was clear that at some point the humans had intervened to preserve her form, which gave me immense satisfaction, even amid my own current turmoil. I found her constant vigil over the
city I had come to love soothing, her presence helpful in centering my thoughts.
I always gave thanks for her presence, even during the years of her restoration, when she was inaccessible and surrounded by scaffolding. At the moment it was most especially welcome as I attempted to sort out the mix of sensations that overwhelmed my mind. I always found a sadness in its face that matched my own. If only it, too, could come to life, I would gladly have welcomed discourse with it.
My newfound freedom had come at a price. Alexandra now worked with the very man who had tortured me at Kejetan’s command. I wasn’t sure what to do now that I was free, but I reasoned that my presence would be missed by my father if I should not return from the work he had tasked me with.
Worse, I imagined that Alexandra might then become a more specific target of Kejetan. In order to ensure her safety, I knew what I had to do and leapt into the night sky, heading out to sea.
It always took some navigation to find the freighter, but the farther out I flew, the higher I went, the sense of perspective making it easier to spy the ship in the darkness of the sea. I spiraled down toward its deck, alive with a handful of stone men and human Servants of Ruthenia, but it was not their activity that caught my eye. A familiar face lurked among the shadows of the shipping containers stacked on the deck of the ship.
Correcting my course, I aimed for the figure, and, before he could notice my approach, I had the alchemist’s head in one of my hands, lifting. Doubling the speed of my wings, I rose into the air as Caleb wrapped both his arms around the one holding his head, clinging on for his fragile human life. I came down on one of the more deserted upper decks of the ship, throwing open the door that led into one of the empty storage compartments there, then closing it behind us once we were inside.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, still holding him. “And where is Alexandra? She was with you when last I saw her.”
“Ow, ow, ow,” he said, pounding his fists against arm and clawed hand. “Let go of my head, and I’ll tell you.”
I unclenched my fist from around his skull and lowered my arm.