Steel and Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  Stone studied the page, trying to make sense of any of the strange printing that covered it. The language here didn’t look like anything he’d seen on Earth; the alphabet looked vaguely runic, utilitarian and angular, though some of the characters had a tantalizing familiarity. Several of the blanks included typewritten words in the same script; he wondered which of them was supposed to be his name. He took the pen and scrawled his signature, glad it was illegible enough that no one would be able to read it.

  She gave him a copy and unearthed a telephone. “I’ve got to get back to work, but I’ll call Faran and have him pick you up. You can wait in the waiting room or outside, whichever you like. It’s been good meeting you, Stone—whoever you are.”

  Byra didn’t seem to be one for long goodbyes, so Stone rose, put the folded copy in his pocket, and left with his bag of spare clothes.

  He opted not to wait in the waiting room. For one thing, there were no available places—every one of the mismatched chairs was occupied by either a sick or injured person or someone accompanying them. They all looked up and studied Stone with varying degrees of disinterest as he crossed the room and opened the door to the outside world, and before it swung closed he heard the unmistakable sound of a child retching. Good choice, he decided.

  Outside, he stepped away from the door and paused for a look around. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought he was still on Earth, even despite the subtle but obvious differences. Those could be explained by a different location in the world, after all. He stood on what looked like a side street in a busy, older city. The buildings were mostly made of dark red brick; they looked weathered and poorly maintained. The sidewalk in front of him was cracked, as was the street—though neither were in as bad shape as the place where he’d been dropped. Across the street he saw a few buildings that looked like businesses, with more of the strange angular writing in their windows along with images that probably indicated their purpose.

  None of the buildings were tall, with the tallest he could see only about five stories. Some looked as if they’d once been taller but their top floors had long ago crumbled or been broken off. From the war, perhaps? Stone decided he needed to find out more about this war, even though nobody seemed to want to talk about it. He looked further up, hoping to spot the floating city Jena had described, but the cloud-choked sky revealed nothing.

  He noticed a few vehicles, but far fewer than he might have expected given his surroundings. All of them looked somewhat but not quite like Earth vehicles—older, battered, and functional as opposed to sleek or beautiful, with solid construction and dull paint jobs. Some were parked along the street, while a smaller number rolled slowly by. Occasionally people walked past in singles or pairs, glancing at Stone but paying him little attention. At least he mostly blended in now—the other people sported similar well-worn work clothes, though most of theirs fit better than Stone’s did. Nowhere did he see the high-collared, sweeping long coats that seemed to mark the Talented.

  He was looking around, noting the subtle differences in the design of the cars, the architecture of the buildings, even the light, when something that had been nagging at his subconscious finally bubbled to the surface: there wasn’t any graffiti, nor any sign of litter blown against the nearby walls. He narrowed his eyes, focusing on the structures closest to him. Surely he must have missed it—with the rough, inner-city look of this place and what Byra had said about “everyone tightening their belts around here,” it seemed unthinkable that some subset of unemployed young people wouldn’t display their frustration by tagging up their territory.

  But no—the structures, though dirty and weather-worn, were devoid of street art, and no food wrappers, drink cans, or wadded newspapers tumbled by in the faint breeze. Interesting, Stone thought, wondering if there was a reason for it beyond an overly enthusiastic neighborhood litter-abatement program.

  A horn honked, startling him. As he turned, a voice called, “You Stone?”

  A boxy gray truck with a small pickup bed was pulling into an open space near him. Hand-painted on the truck’s door was more of the angular script, along with the simple image of a creature that resembled a fat, short-legged red cow.

  A man leaned out the vehicle’s window, one muscular arm hanging over the doorframe. He looked to be in his fifties, with short, brush-cut hair, a neat mustache, and a square-jawed, heavy-browed face. He regarded Stone critically with small, dark eyes.

  “Er—yes,” Stone said. “You must be Faran.”

  “Yeah. Get in. I’m already late with a delivery for takin’ the time to pick you up.”

  Stone hurried around the front of the truck and climbed in. Faran drove off before he’d even settled himself on the wide, stained bench seat. The truck’s engine rumbled and wheezed, occasionally backfiring with a loud pop, as it jounced over the uneven pavement. The interior smelled like the aftermath of a roast-beef sandwich.

  “So, Byra says you’re not from around here.” Faran kept his eyes on the road as he spoke, even though there was hardly any traffic.

  “No.”

  “Got yourself beat up pretty good,” he said. “Almost died, she told me.”

  “I’m much better now. Thanks to Byra and the others.”

  “Yeah. She said they had to get their pet Zap in to heal you up. I don’t trust those bastards—not even the tame ones. Ain’t no such thing as a tame Zap, not really.”

  Stone blinked. “Zap?”

  “You know—the Talented.” His sarcastic tone put finger quotes around the word. He glanced sideways in suspicion. “You ain’t in with ’em, are you?”

  “No. In fact, some of them were responsible for what happened to me.”

  Once again Faran glanced sharply sideways. “Byra said you were a little slow in the head. You don’t sound it.”

  Stone was surprised at how much the words stung, but he supposed he shouldn’t be. His magic might be gone, but his intellect was fine, and there was nothing wrong with his ego. “I’m still recovering. And I’m not familiar with the customs here. Byra thought it best if I didn’t draw attention to myself.”

  “Well, you’re messin’ that up already. But hey, I don’t care. You work hard and don’t give me any trouble, we’ll do fine. I don’t give a damn about your history, as long as you’re not a Zap or one o’ their lapdogs.”

  “No need for concern.”

  “Good.”

  Faran subsided into silence. Stone leaned back in his seat, gazing out the window and watching the buildings go by. As they drove, he noticed the area grew marginally less blasted-looking: the buildings were cleaner and better maintained, the streets less cracked and potholed, and the people’s clothes of better quality. Still, it was obvious to Stone that the area still suffered from poverty. He still didn’t see nearly as many vehicles as he would in a similar Earth city. “Do most people not own vehicles here?” he asked.

  “What?” Faran pulled the truck in next to what looked like a small market.

  “Vehicles. Cars, trucks. I haven’t seen many around.”

  “You are from somewhere else,” the butcher said. He patted the truck’s cracked dashboard. “Only reason I still have this is because I work on it myself to keep it running. Anyway, enough talk. You can start doing your job now. Get the order for the market out of the back and take it inside.”

  Stone got out of the truck and peered into the bed. A few boxes lay there, along with several packages wrapped in paper and string. Each had something scrawled on it in the familiar script. He almost told Faran he couldn’t read, but then glanced at the painted sign on the market’s window. One of the boxes had the same characters written on it. He checked to make sure it was the only one, then grabbed it and hurried toward the market’s door. A quick look revealed Faran leaned back in his seat, picking at his fingernails with a pocketknife.

  Aware of the butcher’s impatience, he didn’t waste time. He strode to the back of the small, dimly lit market and handed the box to a heavyset
woman in an apron, getting only a brief impression of the mixed aromas of vegetables, breads, and meats as he passed the narrow, sparsely-stacked shelves.

  “About time,” the woman grumbled, eyeing him with suspicion. “Where’s Faran?”

  Stone wondered if he was supposed to collect payment, but decided Faran probably would have told him so if he was. “I’m—his new deliveryman. Thank you for your business,” he said, and headed back out before she initiated further conversation.

  There were no more deliveries after that. Faran drove the rest of the way in silence, pulling the wheezing truck into a narrow alley next to a small shop on a busy street. The same fat, red cow was painted on the front window. Stone couldn’t be sure, but he estimated they were less than a mile or two from the hospital.

  Faran got out and jerked his head toward the remaining packages in the truck’s bed. “Bring those inside,” he ordered. “Then I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.” Without waiting for a reply, he disappeared into the shop. A bell on the door jangled as it slammed shut.

  “Well. All right, then,” Stone murmured. Clearly his new employer wouldn’t win any personality contests. He wondered if the man had given him the job under protest, only because Byra had exercised some leverage over him. Was her hospital the only one in the area, or the only one that offered the services of a Talented healer? Faran might not approve of “Zaps,” but it was hard to deny the advantage of having magical healing available for severe injuries.

  It took him two trips to bring in all the packages. He stacked them in the storeroom where Faran indicated, trying hard not to show that even this slight effort had already tired him. Even if he was fully healed now, a week on his back in bed meant it would take time to recover his strength.

  The butcher shop looked like something out of an old movie. Small and compact, it had the same look of being firmly settled in an Earth time period somewhere between the Forties and the Sixties. The front section contained a display case stocked with various cuts of meat, a counter, several hand-drawn signs, and not much else. The display case had refrigeration, but the unit providing it looked old and mechanical. The scales on top were mechanical too. A woman about the same age as Faran, wearing a white full-body apron streaked with blood and meat juice, watched Stone silently from behind the counter as he brought in the packages. Her eyes were narrow, her face set in an expression that wasn’t quite a chilly frown, but it was on its way there.

  “Come on,” Faran ordered after Stone had brought in the last of the packages and retrieved his bag of spare clothes from the truck. “I’ll show you where you’ll stay, and then you can have lunch and get started. No slacking around here. I told Byra I’d give you a job, but that don’t mean you’re not gonna have to work hard.”

  “I have no problem with work,” Stone assured him, hoping his endurance would hold out until he could get some rest.

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  Faran led him through the shop, past the woman (“That’s my wife, Runa,” he said on the way by) down a narrow hallway in the back. He pushed open a door at the end of the hall and stood aside. “You can sleep here. Bath’s next door down.”

  The room was barely large enough to accommodate a narrow bed and a wooden dresser not much bigger than a nightstand. A small lamp with a stained shade sat on top of the dresser next to a ticking mechanical clock with too many unfamiliar numbers. A tiny window with a skewed shade revealed a view of a dingy alleyway.

  “It ain’t much,” Faran said, “but you won’t be spendin’ much time in it. Runa left you a few things in the bathroom, since Byra said you didn’t have much.”

  “Thank you,” Stone said, tossing his bag of clothes on the bed. “I appreciate your kindness.”

  “Oh, it ain’t kindness. Pay for the job is forty bucks a week, but I’m keepin’ twenty for your room and board, and another one this week for the stuff Runa got. No free rides around here.”

  Stone nodded, wondering if the currency here really was “bucks” or if the translation spell had rendered it into something he’d understand. “That’s fine. Thank you.”

  “Yeah.” Faran’s voice held grudging approval, probably because Stone hadn’t objected to the terms. “You’ll eat good, though—you do eat meat, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Makes me sick the way some people try to act like the damn Zaps and think they’re too good for honest meat.” He shook his head in disgust. “Can’t even imagine why anybody’d want to imitate those bastards. Suck-ups. Anyway—” He glanced at his old watch. “Take a little time to get cleaned up, then come find Runa in the shop for your lunch and we’ll talk about the job.” He closed the door behind him, leaving Stone alone in the room.

  He let his breath out slowly and gazed for a moment out the small window, wishing not for the first time that he’d never made the decision to come here. He’d already been here more than a week and wasn’t a bit closer to finding Harrison, and now he was dependent on this job for food and a place to sleep. He doubted the gruff Faran would allow him much time off for his investigations—especially considering the man’s opinion of the Talented—and until he got his endurance back, he probably wouldn’t have much energy to do anything in whatever free time he was allowed. Right now more than anything he wanted to lie down on the narrow, uncomfortable-looking bed and sleep for two or three hours, but that wasn’t an option. If he pissed Faran off enough to sack him already, he’d be on the street with nowhere to go.

  Instead, he left the room and investigated the bathroom down the hall. It was barely large enough to turn around in, but it was clean and included a tiny shower cubicle. Laid out on the small sink were a wrapped toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, a comb, and an old-fashioned razor.

  When he emerged from the bathroom twenty minutes later following a hot shower and a shave, he felt much more human, even despite the ill-fitting clothes. He headed back to the front of the shop and found Runa behind the counter, wrapping up an order for a young woman with a toddler boy. He waited until she finished and the customer left.

  Runa looked him up and down and nodded unsmiling approval. “You look more respectable now, at least.” She hooked a thumb toward a door. “Faran’s in the back with your lunch.”

  Cheery couple, Stone thought. He wondered how much of it was due to their individual personalities, and how much to the hardship of living in this world without any magic talent.

  The door led to a small room with a table and four wooden chairs, a refrigerator that looked even older than the unit out front, and two mismatched easy chairs. Faran sat at the table, halfway through a large sandwich. A closed envelope lay next to his plate, and another sandwich and a tall glass of water sat at the empty place across from him.

  “Sit down,” he said, waving Stone toward the chair. “You eat, I’ll talk. We need to go over some things.”

  Stone, realizing how hungry he was at the sight of the food, immediately started on the sandwich. It was simple, made of only meat and bread, but delicious. The meat looked like beef, but didn’t quite taste like anything Stone had ever eaten before.

  Faran nodded once, apparently satisfied his new employee wasn’t some kind of vegetarian Zap sympathizer. “Okay,” he said. “First thing is, your ID. I want you to know I’m takin’ a chance here, and I’m only doin’ it as a favor to Byra. Understand?”

  Stone nodded and swallowed his current mouthful of sandwich. “Of course. I appreciate this.”

  Faran grunted. He opened the envelope and pulled out a folded paper and a card. “She said you don’t come from around here, and maybe things work different where you’re from. That’s strange, because I thought it was the same everywhere, but whatever. Anyway, here you have to carry your identification and your work papers with you all the time. Believe me, you don’t want to get caught without ’em if one of those Zap bastards asks you for ’em.” His voice dripped with contempt and bitterness.

  “Yes—that�
�s how I ended up in hospital in the first place. So you’re telling me that these—er—Zaps can stop anyone they like, for whatever reason they like? Any of them can do this, not just the authorities?”

  “They ain’t s’posed to. But they do. And what are you gonna do about it? If you piss ’em off they can set you on fire, make your eyes pop out of your head, lift you fifty feet up in the air and drop you—and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. That’s why you stay away from ’em and don’t get noticed. Just do your job and keep your head down, and you’ll be fine. They hardly ever show up in our part of town unless they have some reason. One good thing about livin’ in this hellhole, I guess.”

  “Understood.” Stone wondered how such a society managed to keep running for as long as this one apparently had, but if the mage class was as powerful as it sounded like they were, the “Dim” had little recourse. How could you rise up against a group of people who could kill anyone they chose from a distance? It didn’t appear that the tech level here was high enough to allow for things like large-scale mundane weapons of mass destruction, even if the mages didn’t have ways to protect against them.

  Faran pushed the paper and the card across the table. “Keep the card in your wallet, if you got one, and the papers on you whenever you’re out on the streets. Like I said, though—they won’t stand up to a lot of examination, so keep out of trouble.”

  Shame prickled at the back of Stone’s neck again, but his next question couldn’t be helped: “I’m not sure Byra told you—I obviously speak your language, but I haven’t learned to read it yet. Can you tell me if there’s anything on these documents I need to be aware of, in case someone asks me about it?”

  The butcher stared at him in shocked frustration. “You can’t read? How the hell are you gonna make deliveries if you can’t read?”

  “Don’t worry,” Stone said quickly. “I learn fast, and there’s nothing wrong with my memory. If you mark on a map where the deliveries go, I’ll get them there. I promise.”