Alchemystic

by Anton Strout

All of my pain was gone, replaced by a warm sensation. I looked down, the once-smooth carving now covered with a twisted inset pattern like vines on a wall wrapping in on themselves.

  “Did it work?” the maker’s kin asked me, a nervous smile on her human lips. “Did I restore your memory?”

  I concentrated my thoughts before answering. “I do not think so,” I said. “I do not recall anything new that I am aware of.”

  “Dammit,” she said, slamming the book shut and rising to her feet.

  “What is that?” the blue-haired one asked, pointing at my chest.

  I ran my fingers over the carvings. “I do not know.”

  The maker’s kin threw her book of notes down onto the rooftop at our feet.

  “Easy,” the blue-haired one said. “You may not have restored his memory, but you did make something happen here.” She stepped right in front of me, no fear, her fingers tracing over the design.

  “Alexander’s books called the whole thing Revelation of the Soul,” the maker’s kin said. “Talks about controlling his power, protecting all of us from it. We could use that power to deal with these mad men. Shouldn’t there be some soul revealing going on?”

  “Maybe that’s what you did,” the male offered. The two women looked over at him, waiting. He walked over to me, pointing at areas of my chest without touching it. “What if that’s exactly what you’ve done here? There are depressions in this carving…here, here, here, and here. They look to me like missing pieces.”

  Alexandra ran over to her discarded notebook, scooped it up, and flipped it open once more. “I noted something about gems in here when I was researching earlier,” she said, rushing through the pages. “There are sketches everywhere in my great-great-grandfather’s books. None of the writing alongside any of them made much sense, but I’ve started sketching some of them myself. There’s a reference here…”

  She kept the book open in one hand and scooped up one of Alexander’s older books, flipping through it with some excitement.

  “Soul stones,” she read. “I made a note about them, that they were taken from him for his protection…and ours.”

  “They must be powerful, then,” Marshall said.

  “And we could use as much power as we can get if we want to get at the bottom of who’s after my family,” she said. “I wrote them down because they reminded me of some hippie-dippie healing thing my dad might get into with his spiritual leader. And later on down the page is the Slavonic word for binding, which I’ve already come across at least a dozen times in searching through all the books in the library trying to unlock his memories.”

  “You sure we want to even be doing that?” the male said, stepping back from my form. “Your great-great-grandfather went through a lot to keep this creature’s soul from him. You sure we should even be trying returning it so fast?”

  “The notes I’ve compiled so far say there’s a greater power to be unleashed by the Revelation of the Soul. We’re going to need that to stop these men who are trying to kill me and my family.”

  “So then where are these stones?” the blue-haired one asked.

  Alexandra continued searching through the pages of the book. “That I don’t know,” she said. “There are several notations referring to specific books here, some I can’t seem to find, and a master book of sorts, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across it in his library. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be messing with this, ladies,” the male added.

  “Don’t be ridic, Marshall,” the maker’s kin said. “People are trying to kill my family. Restoring Stanis to the full power my great-great-grandfather hints at is going to stop that from happening.”

  “You don’t know what type of power you’re dealing with, Lexi,” the male said, anger in his words now.

  The blue-haired girl looked up at me. “Surely you have an opinion on the matter, right, big fella?”

  Foreign though the idea was to me, my mind turned the blue-haired girl’s words over and over in my head until they settled down into one desire. “My maker had created me to think, to learn,” I said. “Yet I am unsure of any instruction he meant for me to have on pursuing my own past. However, I think I should like to know more.”

  The blue-haired one slapped me on the shoulder, pulling her hand away, rubbing it. “There you go, sport,” she said. “You need to start doing things for yourself there. Start spending a little ‘me’ time.”

  “‘Me’ time?”

  “Never mind,” she said, then looked at the maker’s kin. “We can work on idioms later. Much later.”

  I did not know what an idiom was, but now was not the time to learn, apparently, which was fine by me. I had been standing here conversing with these creatures for too long after waking, and my body cried out for the sky. “I must fly,” I said, stepping toward the maker’s kin. “If you want to protect yourself, heal your talisman, heal the home. The power in them makes those who wish ill for your family blind to discovering you. The talismans have rendered you invisible to those with dark thoughts against you. The stone of the house keeps it hidden to them, but all are fading. It is how these men have been finding you. I do not know for how much longer the house will remain concealed from them, but for your safety, you must fix this. Your great-great-grandfather always had this master tome you spoke of, one that he kept his most sacred of words in. It is there that you will most likely find your answers.” Without waiting for a response, I leapt up into the air, wings extended and working hard to lift me higher and higher.

  There had been a discomfort tonight, in revealing myself to so many, in conversing, but the strangest part, the one that got me airborne, was being asked what I desired. More so, I had been surprised to hear that I did have an answer for that. Still, I had not the will to wait while they discussed it. Their talk was of restoring my memory to better help find a motivation behind those who wished the Belarus family harm. I knew nothing of those matters, so I set myself to what I knew best how to do. I did as the master rule bid me, trying to protect, the only way I knew how—seeking out any threat to the Belarus family.

  I patrolled.

  Seventeen

  Alexandra

  After the gargoyle had taken to the sky, we headed back into my great-great-grandfather’s studio and library and threw ourselves down across several of the couches laid out in the reading area.

  “That didn’t go as planned,” I said, disappointed.

  “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, right?” Rory asked.

  I sighed. “True,” I said. “I had just hoped the more complete that creature is, the better off it would be at protecting us. I thought restoring his memories and such might provide us more answers.”

  “Like who’s trying to kill you?” Marshall asked.

  I nodded. “Or how to heal my sigil talisman and the house,” I said. “They both seem to offer protection so we’re not directly on the radar of these knife-wielding, hand-tattooed freaks, but the gargoyle seemed to sense it is fading, which would explain how they’ve been able to find me when I’ve been out and about at night.”

  “Not for nothing, but I’m impressed there even exists a magic that can last as long as it has before starting to fade,” Marshall said. “We need to find that master tome the big guy mentioned.”

  I looked around our massive private library. “That’s going to be easy,” I said. “That creature told me that my family has always been secretive. My father and my grandfather always thought Alexander meant to write the family history down, but he must have passed away before he even got a chance.”

  “What if he didn’t put it off, though?” Marshall asked. “Think about it. Look around the room. The man loved puzzles. Maybe he wrote down everything he wanted to pass along, but was worried about other people finding it. He would have hid it, right? You say all those notebooks cross-reference dozens of other sources here, but if there’s a master tome at the center of all of it, that’s going to be the most secre
t one of all.”

  I had been through most of the objects in the studio the night before, and had not seen a huge book lying around. Then I realized…

  “Alexander Belarus was a clever man,” I thought out loud to myself. “He would have hidden it well.” I walked back over to the display shelves, pulling down the stone sculpture of a book I had almost brained them both with the other night when they came up the fire escape after the attack on me in the alley. “Where better to hide a book than out in the open?”

  Marshall laughed, grabbing it from me, attempting to heft the ornate stone book up with his own hands, his gangly arms barely able to lift it. “Good luck reading that. Got a chisel?”

  “Just drop it on the floor,” Rory called out. “Maybe it’s a stone piñata and a real book falls out.”

  “No, don’t,” I cried out, pulling the book back from him.

  “I wasn’t going to drop it,” he said, hurt. “I don’t do everything Rory tells me to, you know.”

  I laid the book down on a stand in the center of the room and spread my hands over the cold surface of it.

  “That’s some heavy reading,” Rory said.

  “Shush,” I said, shooting her a stern look. “Think of it this way. That creature is fantastical, stone that is animated. Rock and stone don’t normally act that way, last I checked. Something changed it from its true physical nature…”

  “Alchemy,” Marshall said.

  Rory and I turned to him, staring.

  “And you thought my years of Dungeons and Dragons wouldn’t be useful for anything,” he said.

  “Isn’t that, like, turning base metals to gold or something?” Rory asked.

  “It’s not just that,” he said. “It’s really the transformation of any matter to another form, explained away by the use of chemistry and magic.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “Much like the gargoyle itself, something alchemically changed that book from its natural form to stone.” I examined the knot work design along the cover. “There are words here.”

  Rory squinted at it. “Where?”

  “Written along the actual knot work itself. It’s Slavonic or Lithuanian, but I think I can make a little of it out. ‘A book is meant to be well red,’ although English was not his first language and he’s spelled read wrong. It’s the same as the dedication page in his Spellmason primer that I discovered.”

  “Maybe you hold a real book up to it,” Rory suggested. “You know, something actually readable.”

  I went to the shelves and pulled down a book, one with a red binding. “Let’s go with ‘read’ and ‘red’ as a combo,” I said, and pressed the book against the stone one, and read the sentence on the knot work out loud using the little old-country language I could muster.

  A moment passed. Then two. Then three.

  “Anything?” Rory asked.

  I shook my head. “Maybe it doesn’t like that book, though,” I said.

  “That’s not the only thing that’s red,” Marshall said, looking over to Rory. “Give me one of the hoop earrings you’re wearing.”

  Rory’s eyes narrowed, her face uncertain. “I don’t think the pirate look is going to work on you. Unless you’re heading down to the Village…”

  He held his hand out to her, flexing it open and closed like an impatient child. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, now.”

  Rory pushed back the hair on the left side of her head and removed the large golden hoop there, handing it to him. Marshall bent it so the exposed post no longer lined up with the circle of the hoop.

  “I think I see where this is going,” I said, “and you can stop right now, Marsh. I don’t need you getting your blood all over one of my precious family heirlooms.”

  “I’m not going to,” he said.

  “Good,” I answered, relieved.

  “You are.”

  I backed away. “Not too keen on the sight of my own blood, either. Why me?”

  “Because it’s your family heirloom; therefore it should be your blood.”

  “Can’t we try yours first?” I asked, the bones in my legs feeling weak as I fought off thoughts of my blood running. “Or how about Rory?”

  “The man has some sound reasoning, Lexi, even if it’s Dungeon Master logic. That…gargoyle’s drawn to you, as are its enemies. If anyone’s blood stands a chance of opening this book, it’s got to be Belarus blood.”

  I shut my eyes and held my hand out to Marshall. “Make it quick,” I said, and before I had finished my words, his hand clamped down around my wrist and I felt a stinging prick at the end of my right index finger. “Yeouch!”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I opened my eyes. A good trickle of blood was running down my finger. Marshall moved my hand over the center of the design on the cover of my book, squeezing. The blood hit the cover and disappeared into the dark cracks of the carving. Marshall shoved my hand down over it. “Say the words on the knot work again.”

  I repeated them as I had the first time. The crack of power was instant, like when you accidentally shock yourself. Underneath my palm the stone shifted, the knot work uncoiling as the feel of leather replaced it, the cover turning to a dark brown. The rest of the tome turned to paper and I pulled my hand away from it, sucking the blood off my finger.

  “Voila!” Marshall said, smiling with pride.

  I grabbed the book and flipped it open on the floor. There were hundreds of pages in it, all of them crammed with Alexander’s handwriting and drawings on every last inch of it. “Maybe I can get this in audio,” I said.

  “You don’t need to figure it all out in one sitting,” Rory said, patting me on the head.

  “Well, let me see if I can find something I’ve been trying to follow the threads through the library on—this heal the stone stuff,” I said, pulling off my necklace and laying it down next to the book so I could see the Belarus sigil there. I scanned the book, looking at the drawings as I went until about three-quarters of the way through I came across the symbol. “Excellent!”

  I looked up at Marshall. “Can you go out on the terrace for a moment?” I asked.

  “Why?” he asked, wary.

  “I want to try something,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, standing up with suspicion in his voice, “but if I miss out on you two exploring the ways of lady love, I’m going to cry.”

  Rory shook her head at him.

  “Just wait out there until Rory calls you back in here,” I said, ignoring him.

  Marshall went across the room, opened the French doors, and stepped out.

  “Okay,” Rory said, turning back to me and the book. “What’s up?”

  “I want to see if something works,” I said, reading over the words on the page. “When I first met Stanis, he looked at my necklace and told me to heal the stone; heal the house. I found mention of it in Alexander’s primer notebook, but I wasn’t sure what it fully meant. But I’ve been tracing the how of it back through the rest of his library and his master book, and now I think I might be able to do it. Heal the stone, anyway. Who knows if I’ll ever figure out how to heal the house, but at least I’m going to try to ‘heal’ the talisman. Then I want to see if it can affect Marshall.”

  Rory nodded, and fell silent as I went over the words and gestures listed there. Keeping in mind what she had said about commitment to each part of it, I cleared my mind, scooping up the talisman and pressing it between my hands. I pressed my will into it as I spoke, moving it through a series of deliberate ritual poses, twisting my arms this way and that to get it right. The warmth in my hands told me it was working, boosting my confidence, which seemed only to increase the heat in my hands until it became unbearable to hold and I dropped it to the floor.

  Rory picked it up by its chain, and tested the stone with her finger. “It’s cool,” she said, handing it back to me.

  The stone was cool, but I now felt the energy of it. I slipped it around my neck. “Send Marshall in, but don’t talk to me, okay? Just star
t talking about—I don’t know—your dating life.”

  “What dating life?” she asked, but she smiled, loving the game of it all, and ran to the doors to get Marshall while I stood and focused my mind on one thought. Marshall was an enemy. Marshall was someone I wanted to avoid. The idea was at its heart ludicrous, but I pushed that away from my thoughts.

  Rory walked Marshall back across the room to where the book lay at my feet, the two of them already in conversation.

  “I’m not terribly interested in dating,” Rory said, stopping when she was about a foot from me, staring into my eyes even though she was talking to him.

  Marshall stopped next to her. “Where’s Lexi?”

  Rory gave him a sidelong glance. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” he said, giving up trying to find me although I was only a foot away from him. “Never mind. Let’s get back to you. How can you not be terribly interested in dating? Everyone’s terribly interested in dating.”

  “Not me,” she said, looking from him to me, then back again. “I’ve got enough on my mind to think about without worrying about someone else and how they’re taking it. I’ve dated; I just don’t care for it.”

  I moved my head to try to make eye contact with Marshall, but when I moved, his eyes seemed to find something else nearby to focus on instead of me.

  “That’s very monastic of you,” he said. “So, what? You’re a monk now?”

  Rory thought about it for a moment, then grinned. “Yeah, I suppose I am. Maybe I should move up to the Cloisters…”

  “Maybe its not that you don’t like dating,” he offered. “Maybe it’s that you just don’t like dating men.”

  “Marshall!” I scolded, but he didn’t hear me. Rory laughed, shaking her head.

  “Oh, I’ve tried that, too,” she said, which got a smile out of him. “I mean, you love who you’re going to love, and that hasn’t always been guys, but at the moment, I’m not taking applicants from chromosome columns X or Y.”

  Marshall looked around the room once more, again not seeing me right in front of him, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “When I first met you guys, I thought maybe you and Lexi were…you know.”