Stonecast

by Anton Strout

  “I am not like those others,” I said. “I can promise you that.”

  “Can you two stop fighting?” she asked. “There’s too much to do.”

  I began to respond, but the sound of activity out in the hallway drew my attention. The voices of Aurora and Marshall arguing filled my ears, and as they came into the guild hall, I saw that their clatter came from both of their arms being overburdened by buckets, plastic containers, hoses, and a host of other implements whose nature I did not fully comprehend.

  Marshall stumbled to the far side of the room, crashing along awkwardly as he went.

  “Bless the Home Depot on Twenty-third Street,” he said, laying down the equipment.

  Aurora followed, laying her armful of equipment down next to his.

  “Seriously,” she said, pulling a list from her pocket. “They had everything you asked for, Lexi.” As she handed the note back to Alexandra, her eyes fell on Caleb, standing at the table. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I asked the same question,” I said. “In the same tone, even. So far, I have not been given a good enough answer.”

  “Everyone relax,” Alexandra said. “I asked him to join us.”

  “Why?” Marshall asked.

  Caleb continued mixing several vials together, not stopping his work but looking over to Marshall.

  “Because I can do more than be sent on shopping errands . . . ?” Caleb said.

  Alexandra turned to him, which caused the alchemist to close his mouth, effectively shutting him down.

  “Because,” Alexandra said, “we’re going to need his help if we’re going to stand a chance against Kejetan. We’ve got what we need to reproduce as much Kimiya as we want, but I need his alchemical expertise in this.”

  “Fine,” Aurora said, but it did not seem she meant the word. She stepped to the wall near where her pole arm rested and leaned back.

  Marshall looked at the massive amount of equipment they had come in with, then back to Alexandra.

  “This is great and all,” Marshall said, “but what are we supposed to do? I mean, we don’t have an army. Kejetan and his men took most of the statues that were left. I don’t care how many buckets of this stuff we make. We’ve got nothing to use it on.”

  “We don’t need statues,” Caleb said.

  “Oh no?” I said.

  “This is our army,” Alexandra said, gesturing to all of us. “Caleb’s right. We don’t need statues . . . present company excluded, of course.”

  “Thank you,” I said, unconvinced. “But I would feel far more positive about our endeavor if there were more of my kind on our side.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Caleb said. “But we don’t need that.”

  “We don’t?”

  “No,” Alexandra said. “Having statues wouldn’t change anything. Kejetan has always ruled by brute force. And I doubt we could have matched his even before he and his servants took their new forms. I’ve been so fixated on handling brutality with brutality that I hadn’t considered much else in the way of handling them.”

  “You want to share how five of us are supposed to take on a freighter full of baddies?” Aurora asked.

  I, too, was curious to hear an answer to this question. I was also curious what baddies were, but I thought I could figure that one out on my own.

  “We don’t need to beat them with strength,” Alexandra said. “We’ll do it with what we’ve got.”

  Aurora picked up her pole arm and swung it through the air with such grace, she appeared to be dancing with it.

  “I’ll go with what I know, thanks,” she said.

  “Don’t be like that, Rory,” Marshall said. He went to the center of the room, where Caleb was working, and began sorting through the glassware there. “Between the five of us, we’ve probably got a pretty good brain.”

  Aurora looked at him over the top of her glasses.

  “We can outsmart them,” Alexandra said, her voice stern.

  “I don’t know, Lexi,” Aurora said, still not convinced.

  “Aurora may have a point,” I offered.

  Alexandra turned to me, a look of shock on her face. “Don’t tell me you’re on Rory’s side, too.”

  “I do not know how you will fare against my father,” I said. “He has not lasted this long by being a foolish creature.”

  “Enough infighting!” Alexandra shouted.

  Everyone stopped their tasks and looked to her.

  Alexandra looked to Marshall, then to Aurora.

  “I know I’ve put a lot on you by asking you to help me here,” she said to her friends, the words quick from her lips in anger, “and I know I’ve kept a lot from you. But I need you to trust me on this.”

  Marshall set down the vials in his hand. “Why have you been keeping things from us? Maybe Caleb was right . . . Are we just your shopping team?”

  Alexandra sighed, then pointed to Aurora. “When Rory got knocked out . . . it made me realize how serious it was that I was putting both of you in danger. More and more. I couldn’t take that. I thought maybe I could do it all. So if there was danger involved, I turned to Caleb. It didn’t matter what happened to him.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Caleb said, returning to his mixing.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, exasperation in her voice now. “You were a stranger. Arcane things are what you deal in, what you freelance in. You’ve chosen the dangerous life. Marshall and Rory? This was all forced upon them.”

  “First of all, nobody forces us to do anything,” Aurora said. “We do things because we want to . . . or in Marshall’s case, because I tell him to.”

  “You don’t understand,” Alexandra said. “It’s not just the danger. There are certain things that I don’t want you to have to do.”

  “Like what?” Aurora asked, the girl getting heated herself.

  I stepped forward. “Like Alexandra’s having to take the life of her brother,” I said.

  Alexandra and Aurora both went quiet for a moment, then Aurora spoke. “Is it true?” she asked.

  Alexandra nodded. “I killed Devon,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “You killed what had once been your brother.”

  Alexandra looked serious. “I did what needed to be done. For the safety of all of us.”

  Much of the anger fell away from Aurora, and she walked to Alexandra. “So you just beat him down?” she asked, impressed.

  “Not quite,” Alexandra said. “I had a little help.”

  Marshall and Aurora both turned to me, but I shook my head. “It was not I,” I said.

  Slowly, they turned to Caleb, who took a moment to wave, the smile on his face causing me to feel a desire to remove it from his face.

  “In all fairness,” he said, “all I did was leave her a little gift. She’s the one who decided to use it.”

  “Okay,” Alexandra said. “So technically it was Bricksley who reminded me I had the damn thing on me, but I’m glad it was I who did it and not any of you. If I’m going to be a part of this life, I need to be ready to do such things. I know that now. It’s why I’ve dealt with Devon and Desmond Locke, and now there’s only one other person I need to contend with.”

  “Kejetan,” I said.

  “And his followers,” I said. “I’m sick of living in fear.”

  “Don’t worry,” Marshall said. “I’ve got plenty enough to go around for all of us.”

  “You should be scared,” Alexandra said, going to the table. She reached into her coat pocket, threw her notebook down next to a stack of books and mixing vats. “This isn’t going to be easy, but if we play this smart, we can end this . . . tonight. Putting Devon out of his misery was difficult. But Kejetan and his men?” She pointed to the empty containers that Aurora and Marshall had brought with them. “We’re going to have to do a lot of alchem
y first.”

  Twenty-eight

  Alexandra

  The calm of the ocean all around me should have been soothing. Given the plan fixing itself in my brain, however, I found that the silence only creeped me out.

  Stanis stood a silent sentinel at the bow of the small boat, his eyes fixed on the dark horizon where the shape of the distant but familiar freighter steadily grew larger at our approach.

  I shivered and pulled out my notebook to go over the spells Caleb and I had worked out.

  “This quiet is killing me,” I said to him. This far out at sea, away from the city and other ships . . . Then it struck me. Something about how the boat was moving seemed . . . off. I turned to look at the back of the boat, where Marshall and Rory were. “You’re not actually running the motor engines, are you?”

  He smiled. “I don’t have to,” he said. “The biggest problem with working for the Servants of Ruthenia was their having a floating home—the freighter. It’s never in one place at the same time.”

  Rory laughed from where she stood by several air tanks and stacks of bucket-sized containers. Her pole arm rested against the boat’s wheelhouse as she pounded the palm of her hand around the lid of one of the containers, securing it.

  “Of course their ship is always on the move,” she said. “Those Ruthenians wouldn’t dare return to their docks. Not after the trouble we caused for them last fall.”

  “Trouble?” Caleb said with a smile. “Do tell.”

  “We had tracked them to a slip out in Brooklyn,” I said. “Rory might have gotten a little . . . kicky . . . with some of them.”

  “And,” Marshall spoke up from where he was looking over the back of the boat at the silent engine, “I got a few of them myself.”

  “You?” Caleb asked, unable to stifle his laugh. “Rory’s a dancer with a pole arm. What’s you’re weapon of choice?”

  “I . . .” Marshall looked defensive, but it fell away and his voice went quiet. “I hit a bunch of them with books I was throwing, thank you very much. I even drew blood. Those corners can be pointy and lethal at high speeds, you know.”

  Caleb’s face was full of suspicious doubt.

  “It was actually quiet impressive,” I whispered, leaning in to him.

  Marshall went back to peering over the side of the boat. “So if you’re not running the engine, and you don’t know where to go,” he said, “how is this boat taking us there?”

  Caleb lowered his notebook. “Kejetan’s freighter is never in the same place twice, so in order for me to get there, I had to get creative. I’m friendly with a few of the Village witches who owe me a favor or two after a job I did for them, so I incorporated some of what they could teach me into creating an arcane binding that’s also alchemical.”

  “Like when Alexander bound Stanis to my family?” I asked, looking at the front of the ship to the stone-still gargoyle in question. “He set up rules when he created him. I set up a few simple ones to keep Bricksley from destroying the house when I’m gone, but that’s about all I really grasp of binding. So tell me, how the hell do you set rules to bind a boat?”

  Caleb shook his head. “This kind of binding is sort of the same idea,” he said, “but a different principle. Think of it like the relationship of a magnet and a piece of steel. Drawn together like that, with this boat acting as a magnet being pulled to the ship. Except to make it work in the witches’ case, I needed this boat and the freighter to share something in common. They call it sympathetic magic.”

  I thought it over for a second, but it didn’t make sense. “How do you make the two objects sympathetic?”

  Alexander pulled off his coat and started rolling up his right sleeve.

  “Oh no,” I said with dawning realization. “You didn’t.”

  Caleb pulled the sleeve all the way up to his elbow, revealing a relatively fresh scar running across his inner arm near his elbow joint.

  “A bit of blood magic,” he said. “I bound myself in blood to both of the ships.”

  Marshall had stopped looking over the railing and came up to us, his face pale. I was pretty sure it wasn’t due to seasickness.

  “And how does that work?” he asked.

  “Lexi here isn’t the only artist,” Caleb said, pushing his sleeve back down over the scar. “I do a little painting myself. I mixed my blood with some seaworthy paint and coated the bow of this boat with it. I did the same with a small section of the freighter, too. So when I step on board this small craft, I drink a little something down, my connection to both ships snaps to, and voila! We’re under way.”

  “Blood magic,” Stanis said from behind me, suddenly so close that I jumped. I hadn’t heard him join us, but his voice was practically in my ear now. “The work of necromancers. Dark work.”

  Caleb hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. “Maybe several hundred years ago, sure, but don’t forget . . . magic has changed with the times. Yes, a lot of it has been lost to legend or locked away by men who thought it too great a power for the world to know—”

  “Like Alexander,” I said.

  “Yes,” Caleb said. “But the magic that has remained has been adapted. ‘Blood magic: not just for necromancers anymore!’”

  Marshall’s eyes narrowed. “So let me get this straight: You willingly cut yourself, drained your blood, then painted two separate ships with it?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “There has got to be some kind of great alchemical insurance coverage out there,” Marshall said.

  “Not as such, no,” Caleb admitted, “but given what Kejetan had been paying me, I would have considered maybe sacrificing a complete limb.”

  “It is amazing the trust one criminal puts in another,” Stanis said, frustration oozing out in every word. “Once my father was done with you, your life would have been forfeit even before you betrayed him by joining in Alexandra’s cause.”

  “Hey!” Rory said, stamping her pole arm on the deck of the ship. “It’s all our cause.”

  “That it may be,” Stanis said, not looking away from Caleb, “but this human sullies himself with such darkness. Alexander would not have approved of such arcana.”

  I stepped back, finding pain in Stanis’s words. Hearing his opinion of how my great-great-grandfather might have reacted—especially when it was contrary to my own feelings about Caleb—struck a nerve.

  “I understand your concern,” I said. “However Caleb has worked this, it is working. This gets us to Kejetan and his followers. We’re going to stick with our plan. Okay?”

  Silent nods came from everyone except the gargoyle. “Stanis?”

  “As you wish,” he said, turning back to the bow of the ship.

  I looked to the horizon, surprised to see the freighter less than half a mile away, already looming menacingly higher than our tiny boat.

  With our craft being the David to its Goliath, the stark reality of our situation sunk in.

  Kejetan’s floating homeland was a singular island on an empty sea. There was no shore in sight, only the distant lights of New York somewhere off in the fog behind us. We wouldn’t have to worry about innocent bystanders out here, but if we failed, there was no one to hear our cries for help, either.

  Judging by the drumming in my chest, my heart was already opting for panic, but I tried to calm it, telling myself to focus.

  “This can work,” I said, for my own reassurance more than anyone else’s. “If everyone does their part.” Our boat was angling in toward a small dock that rose and fell with the waterline, the side halfway up the ship marked with a dark circle that could only have been Caleb’s blood.

  “Don’t head for that landing zone,” I said. “We need to board somewhere with cover, and I suspect there might be people watching the docking section. I know I would be if it were my ship.”

  “Right,” Caleb said. He turned away from
the freighter for a second, shaking himself to break his focus. It seemed to kill the connection to both ships as we fell into a drift. Caleb turned back around, and our small boat curved off its course, the sensation of being pulled by some sort of tractor beam now gone.

  “You do have oars around here somewhere?” I asked, and started to look among all the cluttered tanks and buckets we had brought with us.

  “Somewhere around here,” he said, joining in as he picked his way among the cargo nearest him.

  “Allow me,” Stanis spoke up, once again perched on the very bow of the boat itself. He pushed his wings up and over the front of the boat, dipping them into the water on either side. The stoneskin membrane of his batlike wings worked as massive oars, propelling us forward and keeping us parallel to the ship.

  My eyes searched the deck high above us for a good place to board, and when the familiar sight of multicolored cargo containers caught them, I pointed below where they were stacked.

  “There,” I said.

  Stanis corrected our course with his left wing, bringing us in at the spot, while Caleb moved up next to him at the bow. Caleb’s eyes searched the side of the ship while he squatted and hefted a massive wrap of chain in his arms. Once he had found what he was looking for, Caleb maneuvered past Stanis and secured the chain through a metal loop on the side of the freighter.

  “Don’t want to have our only means of escape drift away, now, do we?” Caleb said as he walked back to me.

  I nodded. “Ready, everyone?” I asked, trying to whisper with as much authority as I could.

  “As ready as I suppose we can be,” Rory said, sliding her collapsed-down pole arm into the artist’s tube across her back. She slapped her hand on the large, steel pump canisters sitting between her and Marshall.

  “Suit up,” I told them, then turned back around to Stanis. “We need all this equipment up on deck, out of sight.”

  He nodded, grabbing several containers at once before leaping straight up into the air, pumping his wings with ferocity. In a second, he was gone into the night sky.