Path of Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  But nothing came. He had no way to counter Desmond’s words, because there was no way to counter them. Desmond had made his requirements crystal clear during their first meeting, and Alastair had failed to meet them.

  “I—” he said again, then bowed his head and let his breath out. “No, sir. You’re right. It should have occurred to me.” He drew in another deep breath and forced himself to raise his eyes to his (likely former, now) master. “I’ll—go pack my things, sir, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “I will not.”

  Alastair blinked. “Sir?”

  “I will not excuse you, Mr. Stone.”

  “I—don’t understand.”

  Once again, Desmond began pacing in front of Alastair. Something about his expression changed, but it was difficult to identify. “Sit down,” he said at last.

  Alastair, growing more confused with each passing moment, did as he was told. He pulled up one of the wooden chairs and dropped into it, never taking his eyes off Desmond.

  This time, Desmond didn’t watch him back. As he spoke, his gaze ranged out over the workroom as if he were speaking to some unseen audience instead of the boy seated in front of him. “I told you, Mr. Stone, on the day before I informed you of the rules you would be expected to follow, that one of my failed apprentices died. You do, I trust, remember that.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve never forgotten it.”

  “You were curious about the circumstances, but you didn’t ask me. Kerrick informs me that you asked him, but that he told you, properly, that he wasn’t permitted to discuss it.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn.”

  “Mr. Stone, I told you only yesterday that it is never wrong to ask a question, even though you won’t always get an answer. I do not fault you for your curiosity. The details were simply not a subject I felt it necessary to discuss with you.” He turned back around to face Alastair and stopped. “However, I have changed my mind. I am going to tell you how my apprentice died.”

  Alastair held Desmond’s gaze, not daring to breathe or reply.

  Desmond resumed his pacing, and once again seemed to be speaking to the room in general rather than to Alastair. “My last apprentice was a brilliant young man from a family with a long history of magical talent. He was much like you, in fact, though he was older—he didn’t begin his apprenticeship until he was eighteen—and unlike yours, his family’s magical pedigree was considerably more unpredictable, and his social circumstances considerably more modest. I agreed to apprentice him because I saw great potential in him.

  “For the first two years, he did not disappoint me. His magical talent was prodigious, and his devotion to the Art was greater than that of any previous apprentice I had ever taught. Whatever task I gave him, or whatever technique I introduced to him, he performed them with skill and confidence. Given that my previous apprentice had failed to complete his training, I dared to hope that this time I might be training a practitioner who had the potential to not only be my equal, but perhaps even my superior, in magical ability.”

  He walked over to the circle and began gathering the crystals, candles, and other paraphernalia Alastair had been using for his lesson that day, magically directing each to its proper cubby. When he finished, he stopped and looked over the circle, his faraway stare suggesting he was seeing something in his mind’s eye. When he resumed speaking, his voice was even and emotionless. “I began teaching him the rudiments of summoning magic. Summoning is not difficult in and of itself—given the proper materials and incantations, even some mundanes can summon beings and entities from other planes. The difficult part is controlling what is summoned. Most of those mundanes and many of the mages who manage it are killed instantly—either because whatever they attempted to summon wasn’t what they ultimately got, or because the summoned being was stronger than they expected.”

  He paused a moment, then walked back until he stood six feet in front of Alastair. “If my apprentice had any fault, it was overconfidence, and perhaps more than a bit of arrogance. These are common traits in our kind, as I’m sure you’re aware. But they’re quite dangerous in an apprentice who hasn’t been fully instructed in the techniques he might be tempted to try.”

  Alastair had nearly forgotten to breathe as he listened to Desmond’s tale. He was sure he saw where this was going now, at least in a general sense.

  Desmond’s gaze locked in on him. “Can you guess what my apprentice did, Mr. Stone?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said softly. “He...tried summoning something, and couldn’t control it?”

  Desmond inclined his head. “He took it upon himself, in an attempt to impress me, to design his own summoning ritual.” He indicated the area above them with a hand gesture. “By that time I had given him access to my own library, and he located some advanced reference material. One night following our lesson, he remained in the workroom and spent most of the night casting his circle. I believe his intention was to present the results of his labor to me when I arrived the following morning.”

  Alastair continued to listen in silence, never taking his attention from Desmond. A chill of dread rose in him.

  “The ritual was intricate and complex—far more so than I had expected him capable of managing at his stage of training. The circle must have taken him hours to produce. It was perfect—with one exception. He’d made a small but critical error with one of the symbols. Possibly it was because he was tired from working on it all night following a full day of training. Possibly he was not as careful as he should have been. Possibly he mistakenly chose the wrong symbol because he misread it. I will never know.”

  Now, he began pacing again, this time circling Alastair’s chair. His voice grew softer and even more inflectionless. “When I arrived at the workroom that morning, it was already too late. He had obviously begun the summoning only a few moments earlier, intending to reach out to a powerful but relatively benign entity useful in assisting with study. But the thing that came through was—horrific.”

  Desmond’s voice and his steps both stopped behind Alastair.

  He twisted around in his chair and was surprised to see his master standing still, fists clenched, facing away from him. It was hard to tell for sure, but he thought he detected a faint tremor in Desmond’s hands. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear all the details. “Sir—”

  Apparently, however, Desmond had now determined it important for him to do just that. He turned back around, composed now, and unclenched his fists. “Horrific,” he said again. “Before I could act, it grabbed my apprentice and pulled him back through the summoning portal. I still hear his screams sometimes in my nightmares. Yes, Mr. Stone, I do have nightmares sometimes. And you will too, as your training progresses, if you don’t already.”

  Once more he resumed his pacing and came back around to the front of Alastair’s chair. “The portal didn’t fade right away—it took several seconds before it disappeared. The creature ripped my apprentice to pieces directly in front of it. It wanted me to see what it was doing. I tried to intervene, but it was already too late. There was nothing I could have done at that point, beyond hasten the closing of the portal. I disrupted the ritual, and the feedback from doing so rendered me unconscious for several minutes. By the time I awoke, the portal was gone, and no trace of my apprentice remained.”

  Slowly and with deliberate calm, he walked over until he stood only a step from Alastair, looming over him. “Do you see now, Mr. Stone, why I do not permit my apprentices—and especially my barely-trained probationary apprentices—from practicing unauthorized magical techniques?”

  Alastair nodded, still afraid to let his breath out. “Y…yes, sir. I do.” He couldn’t help picturing his version of what Desmond had described—the screaming apprentice being ripped limb from limb, blood everywhere… “I’m…sorry, sir.”

  Desmon
d held his gaze for several seconds, then nodded once. “I think you are, Mr. Stone. I think I’ve successfully impressed upon you the reasons for what might seem like arbitrarily draconian rules.”

  Abruptly his entire demeanor changed, returning to its normal brisk formality. He summoned a book, which hovered in front of Alastair. “Continue with the techniques you’ve been working on, and read the first hundred pages of this book by tomorrow morning. If you like, you may continue practicing the technique you demonstrated today, but only with those two spells. Do you understand?”

  Alastair gaped at him. “Er…no, sir. I don’t understand.”

  Desmond’s brow furrowed. “Was I not clear, Mr. Stone?”

  Could Desmond hear his heart pounding? He swiped sweat off his forehead and ignored the book suspended in the air in front of him. “You said—if I broke your rules—”

  “Yes. I did. And if it happens again, there will be no appeal. So I suggest you watch yourself, and consider carefully both the letter and the spirit of my rules before attempting any other unauthorized techniques.” He indicated the hovering book. “If you wish to impress me, you will have ample opportunity simply by mastering the methods and techniques I teach you. I suggest you focus on that.”

  “Er—” Alastair, hardly daring to believe what he was hearing, plucked the book from the air and put it under his arm. He struggled for a moment with what to say, knowing all too keenly how close he’d come to messing up everything he’d been striving for ever since those nights in the attic at Barrow, and how fortunate he was that William Desmond did apparently possess at least a shred of humanity under that hard-assed exterior. “Thank you, sir,” he finally said.

  “Don’t thank me, Mr. Stone. Or rather, thank me by doing as I ask.”

  “I—I will, sir.” He was stammering, but he didn’t care. His body felt like he’d just put it through a marathon followed by an ice-cold shower followed by a quick trip through an industrial clothes-ringer. He took a deep breath, almost said something else, then spun and hurried off toward the workroom door.

  When he reached it, though, a final thought occurred to him—one piece of the puzzle he didn’t have. Did he dare ask, after such a close call? Desmond had said he would never punish him for questions—this would be the real test. “Mr. Desmond?”

  Desmond had turned away and once again appeared to be watching some film unspooling in his mind’s eye. He started slightly, then looked up. “Yes, Mr. Stone?”

  “This apprentice—who was he?”

  Something flashed across Desmond’s eyes—was it surprise? It was too far away to tell for sure. For a long time, he didn’t answer. Then: “His name was Gareth Selby. He was Selby’s older brother.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Alastair did his best, but despite his efforts he couldn’t put his troubled thoughts aside over the next couple of days. Between coming far too close to having his probation terminated due to his unauthorized experiments and the cold realization that it genuinely hadn’t occurred to him they were unauthorized at all (which meant it was possible he could screw up again without even knowing he’d done it), he was constantly watching himself to make sure every bit of magic he practiced was something Desmond had specifically taught him.

  Even with all that, though, it wasn’t the thing causing him the most stress.

  He couldn’t get his mind off what Desmond had told him about Gareth Selby.

  His master hadn’t said anything else after revealing his name, and hadn’t brought the subject up again. At the lesson following their conversation, he’d picked things up as if nothing had changed—either Alastair’s screw-up or the talk about dead apprentices. Alastair had been aching to ask more questions, but he held his curiosity, not wanting to set Desmond off again so soon after such a close call.

  He’d only seen Selby once in those two days, directing some workmen doing repairs in the east wing of the house. He met the assistant steward’s gaze for perhaps a beat or two longer than necessary, then hurried off before Selby could ask him any questions.

  He wondered if Desmond had told Selby what he’d revealed. And even more, he wondered how Selby felt about the situation. Did he even know? If this had been several years ago, Selby would have been a teenager, or even a child, when it happened. Had they told him the details? If they had, how could he stand to work here, surrounded by terrible memories?

  Finally, he couldn’t do it anymore. He was getting to the point where the distraction was affecting his work, and he was sure Desmond had noticed.

  “Sir,” he said as he levitated his books over to re-shelve them after a morning lesson. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course, Mr. Stone.”

  Alastair put the books away and walked back over to where Desmond waited. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me the other day—about Gareth Selby.”

  “I rather thought you might be. In fact, I would be surprised if you weren’t.”

  “Well—yes. Of course I’m thinking about what happened. But there’s something else, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m wondering—well—does Selby know? His brother, I mean. Does he know what happened to Gareth?”

  Desmond’s expression was, as usual, unreadable. “He does, yes.”

  “He knows the details?” Alastair asked, surprised.

  “He knows that his brother attempted an unauthorized summoning ritual that went awry and died as a result, yes. He was young at the time—a bit younger than you are now.”

  Alastair nodded, looking down at the floor, trying to formulate his next question.

  “Is there something else?” It was a question, but not really. Obviously Desmond knew there was.

  “I—” He looked up to meet Desmond’s gaze. “I’m just wondering how he can stand to be here, after—”

  “After his brother was killed during his apprenticeship?” When Alastair nodded, he spread his hands. “Gareth knew the dangers of what he was undertaking. I make sure all my apprentices thoroughly understand that studying with me—with anyone who teaches complex magic—entails a degree of risk. I try to minimize that risk as much as possible with rules such as the one you ran afoul of the other day, but I can’t control everything an apprentice does when he or she is outside my presence.”

  “Yes, but that was Gareth. Selby—his brother—”

  “His given name is Roderick.”

  “Roderick lost his brother. And he doesn’t resent that?” Alastair wondered, now, if that were another of the reasons Selby always came across as so surly and brooding.

  “No, Mr. Stone. He doesn’t. Do you think he would have begged to apprentice with me if he felt his brother’s death was my fault?” He shook his head before Alastair could answer. “No. After I turned him down for an apprenticeship and offered him the position here at Caventhorne and the opportunity for supplemental instruction, I examined his aura thoroughly while asking him some pointed questions about just that. I suspected the same thing you did. But the truth, Mr. Stone, is almost always one’s best defense against misunderstanding. I did not withhold any facts from him, or from his parents. The only exception being that I did not deem it necessary to describe Gareth’s death in detail. That would have done nothing but cause unneeded pain.”

  Alastair pondered that. He didn’t have any siblings, so it was harder to put himself in Roderick Selby’s position, but he wondered if he wouldn’t harbor at least a few lingering subconscious resentments of Desmond. Had the master pushed the student too far? Had he failed to provide enough feedback, spurring Gareth to try more ambitious methods of impressing him?

  He didn’t know. He probably wouldn’t ever know. He swallowed and let his breath out slowly. “Thank you, sir,” he said at last.

  “You’re still not convinced, are you?” Desmond asked. His t
one was quiet and even.

  Alastair shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. It seems hard to believe, but if you say it’s so—you know the situation better than I do. I don’t think it would be a good idea to ask Selby about it, so I suppose I should just let it go.”

  “You are correct that it probably wouldn’t be best to discuss it with Selby.” Desmond returned a group of candles to a table with a gesture. “He is a good man, Mr. Stone—loyal and exceptional at his job. I understand that there might be some friction between the two of you due to your unusual circumstances, but I trust that both of you are mature enough not to allow it to affect your work.”

  “Yes, sir.” He was right—regardless of what had happened to Selby’s brother, and how Selby felt about his own situation, he didn’t intend to let it affect his shot at apprenticeship. “I’d best get going—I’ve got quite a lot to do before our next lesson.”

  Desmond didn’t stop him. He took the lift back upstairs, still thinking about Selby. He did feel better, though—even if Desmond couldn’t read minds, exactly, he was bloody good at reading auras. If his master wasn’t concerned about any lingering bad feelings on Selby’s part, he supposed he shouldn’t be either. As he’d told Desmond, there was no way he was going to approach Selby himself about it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Once again over the next three days, life returned to normal for Alastair—or at least as normal as it ever got at Caventhorne—and once again, he began to entertain the faint stirrings of hope that he might succeed in passing his probation.

  Desmond did not bring up his mistake again, and Alastair remained vigilant to give careful consideration to any magic he wanted to try. He even made a point of running a couple of ideas past Desmond to ensure that they were within acceptable parameters. Sure, he felt a bit like a child who had to run to Teacher every time he wanted to try something new, but better safe than sorry. He could put up with anything for another week, if it meant studying formally with Desmond.