Alchemystic

by Anton Strout

  The two of them looked at the food like I had maybe poisoned it. I didn’t blame them.

  “Our favorites,” I said. “A sort of peace offering. I think maybe I might be a bit overburdened here and emotions might be running a little high.”

  “Might?” Rory repeated, and grabbed the straw of her milk shake, diving in.

  “Okay, are,” I said. “I’m not excusing my behavior, but with work, people trying to kill me, gargoyles to train…I’m in over my head and I’m sorry if I’ve been lashing out. We good?”

  Rory nodded, picking up her gyro and taking a bite big enough that I thought she was going to choke. I envied her metabolism sometimes, then remembered it came from five to eight hours of dance regimens every other day, and my little green monster died on the vine. I looked to Marshall. He still hadn’t touched his food.

  “Stanis and I had a talk,” I said to him. “He feels horrible about what happened. This whole restoration process flooded him with memories and emotions—”

  “It dials them up to eleven,” he said.

  “It does,” I admitted. “And moving forward we need to all keep that in mind. Especially tonight, because I think I have a lead on a second gemstone.”

  Marshall, on the verge of dipping his first onion ring in his milk shake, paused. “You do?”

  “Are you sitting down?” I asked, drawing looks like I was stupid. “All right, all right. Let’s just get all the emotional stuff out of the way at once, I suppose. I went back to that freighter last night, with Stanis. We met someone who gave me a name. Kejetan the Accursed.”

  “Sounds pleasant,” Marshall said.

  “A real tyrant. He ruled Kobryn. It’s near the Polish border, but that’s not the important thing. This informant gave me that ruler’s name: Kejetan, which is one of the statues in my great-great-grandfather’s puzzle path of clues. The other night after we found my attacker dead in Gramercy Park, my father pointed out a statue model of him my great-great-grandfather had done. So I checked the markings on it. The inscription read, ‘The soul of a ruler lies in his chest.’ That’s the Ruler’s Chest, what the master book was pointing to as a hiding place for the next soul stone.”

  “So you found the stone with the statue in your great-great-grandfather’s art studio?” Marshall asked.

  I shook my head. “No, but a full-sized version of that miniature model resides in one of the historic buildings Alexander worked on in New York, so I think I have a fair idea where we might find the next stone.”

  “Where?” Rory asked.

  I turned my head to look out the window, both of their eyes following mine. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stood occupying the city block directly across from us.

  “Is this source reliable?” Rory asked.

  Now came the hard part of the news I had to break to them. “Not in life, no,” I said, “but in death, I believe him.”

  “In death?” Marshall repeated, eating another onion ring. “Who the hell is it?”

  “Hurry up and eat,” I said, opening up my backpack and pulling out three baseball caps. “I’ll tell you on the way over.”

  Once I had paid for our late lunch, I told them about Devon, his not being dead, his new monstrous form, and the events on the freighter last night. Both of them had a ton of questions as we started through the museum, all of which I tried to answer, but they seemed never-ending.

  “Enough!” I finally whisper-shouted. “We need to focus here.”

  Normally I loved visiting museums, but not at the pace we were rushing around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially with the added weight of Alexander’s secret tome in my backpack. I couldn’t take the time to appreciate the actual art within it or really take in the work my great-great-grandfather had done on the building centuries ago.

  “What are we looking for exactly?” Rory asked, the brim of her hat sliding down onto her glasses every few steps as we sped through the museum. The other visitors, few that there were, were snailing their way around, but we were purposeful and driven in our movement.

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure on that,” I said, “but we need to find the rest of the soul gems to restore Stanis completely, give him his memories and his power back, the things that Alexander—be he good or be he bad—deprived him of. But I’ve only seen the reference to the Ruler’s Chest on a miniature of the statue, the real one residing somewhere here. Not only did he give them the statue, but my great-great-grandfather carved a lot on this building, so he had all his lifetime to hide something here. Still, my money’s on it being embedded in Kejetan’s armor.”

  “So we’re looking for another stone that fits into the symbol carved on Stanis?” Marshall asked from under the pulled-down brim of the Ghostbusters hat I had given him.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but don’t just focus on that or we may miss whatever we’re looking for.”

  Corridors of gorgeous ancient tapestries wound around like a carpeted maze, leading from one massive room to another. I definitely had to come back here some time when my dead brother and a cultish group of Lithuanian dictator worshippers weren’t forcing me to restore my gargoyle faster.

  “So what can we focus on?” Rory asked as we moved into another room, this one full of paintings and benches.

  “Alexander died in the early nineteen hundreds,” I said. “I say we look for anything that predates then.”

  I adjusted my brother’s old Yankees cap, pulling at the hair I had stuffed through the sizing loop at the back of it, then drew the brim of it down as far as it would go. I hadn’t wanted to look too suspicious coming in off the streets but I had to do something to disguise us from the security cameras, so it was hats all around.

  We hurried down another hallway and into the promising-sounding Lives of Our Leaders section, continuing our search.

  “These statues all look so serious,” Rory said, examining a group of imposing-looking men nearby. Their carved robes and armor were impressive. “Well carved, but serious.”

  “Nice looking,” I said, moving on, “but the styles aren’t Alexander’s.” The full-sized statue of Kejetan Ruthenia stood among several others farther into the room, and I went to it. Alexander’s hand had captured a cruelty and harshness in the stone, especially in the armored lord’s features, but when I checked the figure over, there was no sign of any kind of gemstone on it.

  Marshall came running over to us, one of the guards at the far end of the exhibit hall shooting him a stern look.

  “Did you find something?” I asked, excitement causing my stomach to clench.

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “They’ve got glaive-guisarmes here!”

  Both of us gave him a blank stare, but it was Rory who asked, “What the hell is that?”

  Marshall’s eyes went wide while he tried to both talk and catch his breath at the same time. “It’s a pole arm,” he said, like we were the dumbest people in the world for not knowing what it was. “Kind of like a staff with an ax head or sword at the end of it. My warrior monk uses one.”

  “Gisarme,” I repeated. “That sounds French.”

  Marshall nodded.

  “Slavic,” I said. “We’re looking for things a bit more Eastern Europe than France. Focus.”

  “Sorry,” he said, his excitement deflating.

  Rory had finished looking over another section of well-carved, well-dressed Russian-looking minions. “Well, nothing stands out to me, but really the only art I pay attention to are those dancer statues by Degas.”

  I took my time going over the other statues nearby, shaking my head when I was done. “None of these other ones are half as good as Alexander’s work,” I said.

  “I’ll say,” Marshall said. “They don’t even come to life!”

  “Shut it,” Rory said. “Before I decide to take up the glaive-guisarme and make you my practice dummy.”

  “Watch it,” he said. “Or I’ll up your half of the rent.”

  “Stop it,” I hissed out as quietly as I cou
ld in the large open space, my voice echoing. “You’re drawing looks from security.”

  Thankfully that worked and the two of them fell silent. “Sorry,” Marshall said.

  Rory sighed. “Me, too,” she said, forcing it out.

  “You two can get back to bickering like a married couple once we find what we came here for,” I said. “Promise.”

  “Awesome,” Marshall said, sitting down on a stone bench along the wall.

  “Hey!” the guard shouted from across the room. “Off the exhibit!”

  Marshall didn’t move. His hands were spread out on the stone he was sitting on, oblivious.

  “Up! Now!” the guard said, starting over to us.

  “Marsh!” Rory called out. “Get up, dumb ass.”

  He lifted his eyes to meet mine. They were wide, not with panic, but excitement. He started drumming his hands on the bench to draw my attention.

  Only it wasn’t a bench, I realized. “Get up,” I said, my voice calm but dead serious. “Now.”

  Marshall stood and I turned to the guard. “Sorry,” I said, quick as I could. “My friend thought it was a bench.”

  The guard stopped, hesitating in his tracks, then adjusted his uniform on his walk back to his spot between rooms, but kept watching us. I grabbed Marshall by the arm and pulled him farther away from the piece, which seemed to satisfy the guard enough that he turned his attention back to watching our room and the next one over.

  “What was that about?” Rory asked, coming over to us.

  “Look,” Marshall said, pointing to the “bench.”

  Marshall’s bench wasn’t a bench at all, but an ornately carved stone chest. Most might mistake the braid work all over it as Celtic, but I knew better. “Those patterns remind me of something very particular.”

  “The carvings on Stanis’s chest,” Rory said.

  “Thing is, I don’t see any stones on it,” Marshall said.

  “Don’t you see?” I asked, but continued on without waiting for an answer. “It’s a puzzle box. Look at the way all those designs run through each other. They interlock. And like Alexander’s notes said, it is a chest where we found the ruler, so whatever we’re looking for is going to be inside it.”

  “So what the hell do we do?” Rory asked.

  I cracked a smile. “We open it.”

  “You mean you open it,” Marshall said. “But what do we do? Let me guess…Distract the guard.”

  “I can do that,” Rory said. “I can be very distracting when I want to be. How long do you need?”

  I shrugged. “Not sure,” I said. “I’ve messed around with some of my great-great-grandfather’s puzzle boxes in his studio, but I suppose it really depends on how puzzling it truly is.”

  “We’ll just position ourselves between you and him, hopefully blocking his view,” Rory said. “So get to it.”

  I nodded, then turned to the chest, walking over to it. The guard wasn’t paying us much attention now, and I examined the chest by simply walking around it first to keep suspicion off us. I traced the knot work of the intricate carving. “It looks like an ornate tangle of snakes,” I said. “But I think I can untangle them if you can cover me while I work out the spell.” I fished the tome out of my backpack and flipped it open.

  Rory and Marshall moved into position, Marshall looking like he was about to throw up. “I don’t deal well with deception,” he whispered. “I never played any of the Chaotics…not Chaotic Good, Neutral, or Evil. Definitely not Chaotic Evil.”

  Rory patted him on the shoulder. “This is another one of those gamer things, isn’t it?”

  Marshall nodded.

  “I figured that was why I didn’t understand it,” she said, then quickly added, “Nor do I wish you to explain it to me.”

  The two of them seemed content to chatter away and I dropped to my knees in front of the chest, resting the book on the tiled floor in front of me. This was different from shifting broken bricks at the building collapse site. Unraveling a puzzle chest like this was going to take finesse, not brute force, but having uncoiled the hidden one in Stanis’s chest twice now, I felt a tiny bit of hope for success.

  I studied a section of Alexander’s book that looked promising, one that showed a gentler way to coerce raw stone in motion, but it meant having to touch parts of the chest, which might draw the guard’s attention. Still, Marshall and Rory were blocking his full view of me, so without another thought I slapped my hand along the front of the chest where two sections met and pressed my will into it while incanting the words from Alexander’s tome. Many of them, surprisingly enough, were becoming recognizable to me, making sense now, and I felt the meeting of the two pieces of stone give way to my command, a low grinding sounding out from the chest.

  Marshall gave me a worried look over his shoulder and shushed me, but I didn’t let it break my string of words. They were the key to getting this puzzle unraveled and I had to be fast about it. We were the only visitors in our section now, but it was only a matter of time before we either drew the guard’s attention again or other museumgoers came into this area.

  The stone snakes pulsed as I unwound them from one another, small clouds of the dust of ages wafting off them.

  “Hurry!” Marshall whispered, his nervous eyes darting back and forth from the guard to the chest.

  I couldn’t respond or I’d break the spell, but what I really wanted was to tell him to shut the hell up. Did he think I wasn’t trying to hurry? I was going as fast as I could, but between the tangle puzzle and the sheer weight of the stone coils, it was like untying anchor chains. I pushed all other thoughts out of my head and focused on the elaborate puzzle box.

  “Goddammit!” the guard’s voice called out from somewhere on the other side of my friends. “Didn’t I tell you to keep away from that?”

  “Shit,” Marshall said. “Oh, shit.” His nervous pacing caught the corner of my eye, but I held my focus.

  “Don’t worry. I told you I’d take care of this,” Rory said.

  Rory started off across the room toward the guard at a brisk pace, and I couldn’t help but turn to watch her while my hands kept working on one of the inner knots of the chest. Rory hugged the wall to our right, then kicked her foot out at one of the weapon cases, shattering its front pane. She shot her arm into the case and toward the weapons rack inside, tugging at one of the pole arms within and breaking the restraint that held it in place.

  The guard pulled a walkie-talkie from off his belt. “We’ve got a situation in Lives of Our Leaders,” he said. Before he could say much more Rory freed the pole arm, which, by its look from Marshall’s descriptions, was a glaive-guisarme, and ran at the man.

  “Not the pointy end!” Marshall yelled out.

  Rory swung the long hooked weapon around like she was Darth Maul, putting the spear end closer to her body than the guard’s. She swung low, sweeping behind the guard’s legs, knocking them out from under him. He flew up in the air, hanging there for a second almost cartoon-style, before his body fell back, his head hitting the tile with a solid thunk that could only be bone.

  “Jesus Christ!” Marshall cried out.

  Rory’s face was full-on worried, stepping closer to stand over the man and leaning in. A look of relief washed over her face. “We’re good,” she said, giving me a thumbs-up. “Still breathing.”

  A commotion rose from farther off in the museum, the sound of others approaching.

  “Make like the Flash!” Marshall called out again.

  My arms were elbow deep within the darkened shadows of the chest, leaving me to work by touch alone, but I kept at it. After several moments of untangling, my fingers felt something more refined: the smooth, glassy texture of a better cut of stone. A gem—one of Stanis’s.

  “Got it!” I cried out as I closed my fist over it, but as I did, something wrapped around my hand. I jerked my arm out of the chest as some sort of self-preservation kicked in. Although most of the unraveled puzzle parts lay uncoiled on the fl
oor all around me—now an inert pile of stone—my arm came free of what remained of the chest with a carved snake mouth clamped down over my wrist. As I backed away, a long, slender body of stone emerged. At about the six-foot mark, it came free and the creature began to curl its body on the floor, its weight starting to draw me down to it.

  “A little help,” I called out. I whispered some of the speaking-to-stone incantations I knew by heart now, but nothing seemed to help exert my will over it. “Belarus blood or not, this thing is not going to play nice.”

  The guard groaned from where he lay on the floor, his body stirring.

  “He’s waking up,” Marshall said, his nerves shot. He looked at Rory. “You couldn’t have knocked him out for longer?”

  “I was pulling my punches,” she said, and started toward me.

  “Why?” Marshall asked.

  “He’s not evil, jackass,” she said. “He’s just doing his job! I’m not going to brutalize a guy for that. That doesn’t really jive with my moral compass. A girl has got to have a code to live by.”

  Rory turned away from Marshall completely, picking up speed as she came for me. She tore across the floor while twirling the pole arm in her hands like she had owned one all her life. She leapt toward me on those strong, lean legs of hers and brought the blade down hard just behind the head of the snake creature. The spearhead pierced the stone, going deep before Rory twisted the blade, pulling free a thick chunk of stone it had displaced. The living piece dropped away, going inert and rolling across the floor. Cracks appeared all along the creature’s head and body as the whole thing stilled and solidified.

  Rory spun her weapon around. “Oh, I need to gets me one of these,” she said.

  I raised my trapped hand high overhead and brought it down on the edge of the puzzle chest’s frame as six more guards poured into the far end of the room. The snake head shattered, flaking off my still-closed fist. When I opened it, there was the stone I had come for, this one red. I looked at Marshall in triumph, but he was busy fretting over the men closing in on us.