by Anton Strout
“Got it!” I said, thrilling as I found the passages. Most of it, thankfully, was familiar to me, similar to the power that I had used in holding back the avalanche, only with minor variations and adjustments in both the language and somatics of it. I incanted the spell, focusing my concentration and will on it as I rushed the words out. I spoke the final one and gestured, then felt the power leave my body, but something didn’t quite feel right with it, the bond lost.
More bits of brick and dust came raining down from up above, finding their way around the gargoyle’s wings. A sizable chunk of brick hit my head, and I swore, feeling a warm trickle of blood running down the left side of my face.
“It’s not working,” I shouted, my frustration with myself rising.
“Relax,” Rory said, although her voice cracked when she said it. She pressed her back against mine.
“You relax!” I shouted back at her. “I can feel your heart pounding away like the drilling of a jackhammer.”
She pushed herself away from me. “Sorry,” she said, turning to face me and grabbing my arms, “but for reals. You need to relax. When you rush things, you screw them up. Keep it committed, extended, just like in dance. Take your time and get it right…once.”
The cloud of brick dust growing all around us filled my nostrils, forcing a sneeze out of me as it had Marshall, but I fought off the urge to sneeze again. If I couldn’t get the incantation out properly this time, it would be only a matter of time before Stanis’s strength gave out.
I did as Rory instructed, relaxing myself as much as one could under several tons of stone held up by an enchanted stone statue. This time I went through every motion and every word as if it were the most important thing in the world. Given that we were about to die, it definitely was, but I tried my best not to think about that and held my concentration on what mattered most.
The downpour of dust and debris grew, more like a constant curtain now, but I took my time. I finished, the buildup of power once again leaving my body, only this time a connection snapped to and joined me with the stone of the door. I pressed against the door with my mind, but it was still unmoving. Rather than get worked up, I kept my concentration and continued pushing at it with my will.
The heavy stone door gave a slight shift, and once I noticed it was hinged along its right-hand side, I slid as far to the left of it as I could with my body as well as my mind now, using the leverage to my advantage until I stumbled forward, falling into the darkness behind it as it gave way, opening. Rory, then Marshall, tumbled in after me, both landing on top of my already prone body. Barely visible through the falling rock, Stanis’s figure struggled in through the frame of the doorway, then darted forward, folding his wings in as he dove into the room.
The three of us scattered, rolling left and right to avoid being crushed under his weight, but we needn’t have bothered. Once through the doorframe, his wings shot out and the gargoyle flew over us and into the center of the room behind us. I rolled over to follow his path, taking the room in. Marshall’s flashlight barely lit up the enormous space, but the hint of its height and width were evident in the traces I could see of the gargoyle arcing up high into the room. The three of us scrabbled to our feet. I snatched the light from Marshall and shone it around the room as the gargoyle swept down behind us from out of the air.
A circular room carved of the same polished stone on the outside of the door sat within. Stone tables and chairs sat around the outer edge of the space, the same octagon with bat wings from my necklace notable in several decorative elements within the stonework of the walls.
“Is this an ornate clubhouse?” Marshall asked. “Or, like, the Belarus Cave? Please tell me there is a Belarusmobile.”
“I have no idea,” I said, stepping farther into the room. “This looks like a meeting facility of some kind, but as far as I know, my great-great-grandfather didn’t keep a large circle of friends. Runaway exile from the old country. Go figure.”
“Stop!” Marshall shouted when he finished marveling at the details of the room and noticed me, but it was too late. Then a stone under my foot sank into the floor, a series of quick clicks sounding off like bones breaking. I pulled my foot off of it a second too late as a barrage of large stones tore free from their place among the decorations on the walls and flew toward me at the center of the room.
Stanis dashed forward but he was too far away. My stomach dropped as I closed my eyes and curled myself into as small a ball as I could, hoping to avoid their crushing blows as panic filled my mind, awaiting the impact.
Oddly, there was none, only the gritty, shifting sound of stone. I opened one eye, sneaking a peek. The floor around me now stood in a haphazard protective globe all around me, the only opening in it a small hole the size of my fist at the very top. The sounds of the flying rocks outside echoed loudly as they smashed into the outer side of the barrier.
“Thanks, Stanis,” I shouted up through the opening as I choked on the swirling cloud of dust filling the confined space.
“I did nothing,” the creature said, his voice calm and even.
“Well, I know Rory and Marshall didn’t do it.”
I heard scrabbling on the outside of the walls, and Marshall’s face appeared at the opening at the very top of the stone prison. “I tried to stop you,” he said. “One of the cardinal rules of a dungeon crawl: Always check for traps.”
“This isn’t one of your games,” I reminded him.
“I think my point still stands,” he said, and disappeared from the opening, sliding back down.
“Lexi, I think you might have done this yourself,” Rory called out.
“How?!” I shouted out. “I didn’t even have my damned notebook open!”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but from out here, it looked pretty much like a knee-jerk reflex action.”
“Great,” I said, giving a thumbs-up through the opening. “Now get me out of here.”
“Can’t you get yourself out?” Rory asked.
I pressed my will into the surrounding stone all around me, the way I had outside this room, but met nothing but resistance.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “This isn’t like pushing away broken rubble or opening a door.” I slapped my hands against the sphere, running my hands over its cold, jagged contours. “This shit is fused together. Solid.”
A lone claw set itself into the opening at the top, curling in along the edge. “I will free you,” Stanis said, and pulled at the first of the stones. It held for a second, but soon cracked under the pressure of the creature’s strength, pulling it away to widen the opening. After several minutes of this a space opened wide enough for me to wiggle my way out, leaving the rest of the sphere there like some creepy alien egg.
I slid down the side of the sphere, Marshall catching me.
“You need to be more careful,” he said. His eyes were narrowed at me, pissed. “Think, Lexi, won’t you? The man who made your stone Batman here, the same one who built this indestructible room—don’t you think it’s possible he may have put traps in place as a preventative measure?”
“I thought this place might be safe, actually,” I countered, but he just shook his head at me. I pointed around the room. “Look. It’s got my family’s sigil everywhere mixed in with all the other markings; why wouldn’t I be safe here? I’m part of Alexander’s blood!”
“Sure, there’s magic in play here,” he said, “but I doubt the magic itself is anything sentient. How is this place supposed to know you’re his great-great-granddaughter?”
Marshall had a point. The fact that this place even existed in the first place was a minor miracle. Why was I getting so demanding of it like I knew anything about what was really going on here? Just simply being a Belarus didn’t ensure my safety, despite the large shift in protection that came from having your very own gargoyle watching over you. During the day, for instance, I was as vulnerable as the next person, and realizing that made me feel incredibly fragile, but I fought
the insecurity I found mounting.
“Okay, then,” I said, shaking it off. “Everyone step careful. Don’t do as I do.”
I moved at a snail’s pace around the room this time, checking the floor before every step, shining the flashlight up onto the walls as I went. Marshall walked up to one of them and pointed at the markings carved there.
“These symbols are everywhere,” he said.
“It’s in most of his books back in our library, too,” I said.
“Recognizing the symbols is great,” Rory said, “but unless you can read Aramaic or whatever this language is, we’re not going to get anywhere. Specially with all that debris now caved in at the door leading out of here like that.”
“It’s not Aramaic,” I said. “And I recognize it.”
“Really?” Rory asked, sounding impressed.
I nodded. “It’s the language he wrote a great deal of his notes in, kind of a bastardized old-country Slavonic-Lithuanian hybrid. My brother and I actually used it back when we were little, you know, when we actually got along. Much of my family’s older accounting records were written with it, but we didn’t know that when we were kids, obviously. We just thought it was a cool secret code we could write letters in.” I studied the panels on the wall. “Some of this makes sense to me, but it’s been a while. My ancient Belarus is a bit rusty so you’ll have to forgive me.”
“What does it say?” Rory asked.
I went silent as I sorted it out, trying to make sense of it all and fill in the blanks of what was implied in what I could not make out.
“I don’t suppose this makes any sense to you?” I asked Stanis, who turned to look where my eyes were fixed.
The gargoyle stared at it for a long while before finally answering. “I am afraid not,” he said. “Alexander spoke of his language, his language of secrets, but I believe he already had a hard enough task in impressing your American English on me.”
Marshall walked over to my side, looking over the elaborately carved wall himself as he took his flashlight back. “Usually I’m a fiend for puzzles,” he said, “but I don’t think I can break down and decode a whole language right now. What can you make out of it?”
“Well,” I started, “I don’t think my great-great-grandfather was just the simple solo magic practitioner some of his books make him out to be.”
Marshall did a full circle, swinging his light around the ornate room. “One man does not build something as monumental as this just for himself.”
“Exactly!” I said, pointing up at the wall. “This section here talks about a ‘closed’ society, but I think the translation is a little lost here. I think he meant a secret one…”
“Like the Shriners?” Marshall asked.
“More like the Freemasons,” I corrected, then jabbed my finger up at another spot along the wall. “He even invokes a similar name, that this space was to welcome the Spellmasons.”
“And this was like a guild hall,” Marshall offered. “A safe place where he could meet with others of his kind.”
“So there are others of these Spellmasons?” Rory asked.
“I have no idea,” I said, walking off toward the darkness of another wall, drawn by the glimmer of something along its surface. I reached out, my fingers brushing the cold, smooth surface of it. “Glass. Hey, Marsh, shine that over here.”
Light revealed a large glass case with hinged doors that hung open, the contents behind them containing more than a dozen shelves filled with beakers, bottles, and vials, much more full than the secret area in Alexander’s studio.
“Looks like the Spellmasons were going to have a hell of a pharmacy,” Rory said. “What is all this?”
I picked up a brown jar the size of my hand, liquid still held within it after all this time. The handwritten label, the same script as in Alexander’s notebooks, read “antimony trichloride.” “I’m not sure,” I said.
“I am,” Marshall said, joining us. “It’s for alchemy.”
Rory ignored him and looked around the space. “Do you think your brother knew anything about this?” she asked.
I took the light back from Marshall and flashed it around the room, searching. Something scattered across one of the long stone tables on the far side of the room caught my eye, and I went to it. “Pretty sure,” I said, picking up a thick manila folder from the table. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t have modern-day office supplies back in Alexander’s day.”
“So, what?” Rory asked. “Your brother brought this place down on himself playing Harry Potter?”
I flipped through the folder, full of the type of papers and schematics I dealt with now. “I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “He was always good at making poor life choices, so it’s possible he crushed himself to death screwing around with this.” Not like I’d been so far away from it myself.
I closed the folder, the back side of it showing now. A billing invoice from a slip at a Brooklyn shipyard sat clipped to the back of it. A date and time written on it in my brother’s handwriting. “This is from the night he died.”
“What is it?” Marshall asked.
“A bill of lading.”
“Lading…?” Rory asked.
“It’s a legal agreement between shippers and carriers,” I said. “We deal with a lot of suppliers in renovation and construction. Devon must have had it with him, for his meeting.”
“Then we should check it out,” Rory said.
“I can check it out,” I said. “Back at the office. We should have all our dealings with them on file somewhere.”
Marshall sneezed.
“We should go,” I said, stuffing the folder into my backpack and flipping my own notebook back open, readying the incantation once more since there didn’t seem to be any other way out. The four of us gathered at the door. My jaw still ached slightly, but I’d have to endure it again. What other choice was there? If I had better command of this power, I probably wouldn’t be hurting myself so much attempting it…
“Just give me a second,” I said. “I swear I’ve been spending all my non–day job time reading up on all this, but it references so much else in my great-great-grandfather’s library. I need more time. But first, I’m going to sleep for a thousand years.”
“You will be dead by then,” Stanis reminded me from somewhere behind us, and I couldn’t help but smile. “That was one of your ‘idioms,’ was it not?”
“You’re learning,” I said. “I knew you were good for something other than heavy lifting.”
He smiled. And as he did, I immediately felt unbelievably guilty about what I’d said about his only purpose being to serve me.
“And flying,” Rory added.
“And that eternal-living thing,” Marshall offered.
I sighed and pressed my will against the stone spilling into the room from outside the door. I just wanted to be out of there, despite how architecturally interesting the space was. The only thing I really cared about right now was the bliss of my bed. The spells, alchemy, the Spellmasons, searching out the documents we found…All that could wait.
If sleep was for the weak, then I was the weakest person alive right now, and I was okay with that.
Nineteen
Alexandra
I slept in and I slept late, my family’s business schedule be damned. It wasn’t like contractors weren’t used to keeping people waiting, anyway, and my body had been craving rest by the time I’d gotten in last night. When I woke around noon, my jaw still ached and my very soul felt made of lead, but I forced myself out of bed. Within a half hour I pulled myself together—showered, ate, rescheduled the meetings I had missed before hitting the offices down on the public street level.
If there was an order to our current filing system, I didn’t possess a high enough education degree to figure it out, which meant it took most of my afternoon to check the bill of lading against our records.
Numb from the search, I snuck away around three and headed to the studio upstairs to get b
ack to what was really on my mind—deciphering more of Alexander’s magic ways. By the time Rory stepped out of the elevator a few hours later, I had switched to overalls, already covered in flecks of clay that also coated both my hands like gray gloves.
Rory walked over to me and grabbed me by my forearm, raising my hand up to look it over. “New look for you,” she said. “I like how it hides your chipped, broken nails.”
I pulled my hand away, going back to the clay I was working with a piece of brick on the table. “You took the elevator up,” I said, ignoring her comment.
“It was a dance day,” she said, throwing herself down onto the nearest couch as her bag hit the floor. “Just a little too sore to haul myself up the fire escape, which means of course I ran into your father.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” she said. “I caught him in a good mood. He only blessed me three times.”
“Only three?” I asked. “Wow. That is a good day. I think he’s happy as a clam because he saw me working in the office earlier. Of course, he thought I was actually getting work done, but most of it was investigating that appointment my brother had the night he died.”
Rory stuffed one of the pillows under her head, slid her glasses off, and looked over to me, squinting now. “Anything?”
I shook my head, nodding toward the folder at the end of the worktable I was at. “I couldn’t find record of them as one of our shipping vendors,” I said, “but the address on it points to a slip at a shipping yard belonging to Varangian Freight. Strangely, it’s from the old country and arrived back at the top of July.”
“Where is this slip?”
“Out in Brooklyn.”
“Should we head out there? Do a little recon? Maybe after a little nap…?”
I laughed. “Not quite yet,” I said smoothing down the last of the clay to the project I was working on. “I have something to show you. Come here.”