Steel and Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  Jeritha and Errin bore the brunt of it, the Traveler remaining closely tuned to the astral energies and calling out course corrections frequently enough so Stone lost any doubts he might have had about the area’s unpredictable dangers, and Errin struggling to keep up with them despite flying blind.

  To the non-magical eye, the land streaking by below looked primarily wild and green, with craggy, far-off mountain ranges, hazy, low-lying cloudy or foggy patches, and the occasional meandering river or tranquil lake. But even Stone, who didn’t have anything close to Jeritha’s sensitivity, saw another story when he shifted to magical sight. The magic was alive out here, colorful and dangerous in the manner of creatures back on Earth that lured prey using their bright hues. He knew Errin wasn’t seeing the way patches of spiked crystalline structures blazed with unnatural light, or how magical energy arced and danced between them. She didn’t see the miasmic green glow lingering over a lake that otherwise looked pristine and inviting, the jagged red streaks stretching out like banners behind a massive herd of creatures that resembled spiny buffalo, or the enormous, sparkling energy cloud crawling across an area covering several square miles.

  Even without such capability, though, Errin retained a scientist’s curiosity about what passed below them. “I wish we could get some photographs of this,” she commented at one point after they’d steered clear of what was clearly the ruins of a city, already mostly reclaimed by rocks and underbrush. Before they’d flown out of range, she’d pointed out several dark mounds that might have been the remains of broken machines the size of buildings.

  “I’m not sure they’d register properly,” Jeritha said. “The magic here protects itself from discovery. It—turn north, quickly!”

  Errin wrenched the yoke in that direction, and after that she concentrated on flying and didn’t ask any other questions.

  Stone, meanwhile, with less to do, focused on examining the ground below, using both magical and normal sight. He agreed with Errin—he’d definitely like the opportunity to explore this area more thoroughly. But one look at Jeritha’s tense expression convinced him that perhaps sometimes limiting one’s curiosity was a good thing. Right now, he’d settle for getting through this nightmarish environment and landing near Drendell in one piece. “How much further is it?” he asked, after the little craft’s dashboard clock showed three hours had already passed.

  “It isn’t far now,” Jeritha said, without taking her eyes off the view out the front window. “A few more minutes, and we should be—”

  “What’s that?” Errin demanded, pointing.

  Stone twisted in his seat to look out the side window. At first he didn’t see it, but then his gaze locked onto a dark, winged creature wheeling in the sky some distance away. “Bloody hell—is that a bird?”

  Jeritha couldn’t take her attention from the forward view for long, but she cast a quick glance to the side and tensed. “It’s a wyvora.”

  “What’s that?” Errin asked. “Do we need to worry about it?”

  That seemed a pertinent question, as the winged creature was moving closer to them, perhaps curious about this new species of flying thing invading its space.

  “It isn’t a bird,” Jeritha said, with yet another glance sideways. “Wyvora are large flying reptiles.”

  “You people have dragons?” Stone asked, gripping his chair arms.

  As the thing drew even closer, though, he could see it didn’t look much like an Earthman’s idea of a dragon. Black as the night sky, it had leathery wings, spindly, clawed fore- and hind legs, a thin body, and a long, narrow head featuring a mouth bristling with teeth. Its eyes burned with a red light. If Stone had to say anything about it—aside from the fact that it looked dangerous due to its sheer size—it would be that it looked unhealthy. Like everything else out here, he reminded himself. That didn’t mean it couldn’t kill them, though.

  “Can it take out the ship?” he asked Errin.

  “I don’t know. Does it cast spells?”

  “No,” Jeritha said. “They normally hunt prey on the ground. They don’t come near our bands or settlements.”

  “How do we deal with it?”

  Again, a reasonable question. The wyvora opened its mouth and emitted a high, squawking screech audible even through the airship’s hull, then streaked toward them.

  “Turn a little west,” Jeritha said urgently. “It’s the magic we have to worry about, not the wyvora.”

  “I’d say it would be wise to worry about both,” Stone muttered, already gathering energy for a spell if need be. “You focus on the magic. I’ll deal with this thing if it gets too close. Are there any weapons on this ship, Errin?”

  “No.” She, too, kept her focus on the way forward, but couldn’t help snatching nervous glimpses toward the approaching monster. It was close enough now that they could all clearly see its leathery black hide, burning eyes, and rows of jagged teeth.

  It might have been playing an elaborate game of chicken with them, but Stone wasn’t inclined to wait around and find out. He gathered magical energy and formed it into a ball of fire outside the ship, then flung it straight at the wyvora’s gaping open mouth.

  The thing’s screech grew louder, echoing through the ship’s tiny cabin. It beat its wings with frantic urgency, wheeling away with smoke trailing from its mouth.

  “Take us down,” Jeritha’s words came fast. “We’re getting close. Bear a little to the right.”

  Errin banked the ship right, pushing the yoke forward to lower the nose and begin their descent. Due to its design it could lose altitude faster than a standard plane, which made for a harrowing ride.

  Stone, in the back, held tight to his seat arms and kept his eyes on the wyvora. It had slowed and now circled a hundred feet or so away. Its glowing red gaze was fixed on the ship, but so far it hadn’t approached again. It circled back and forth, never taking its focus from its would-be prey.

  “There’s a place we can land just ahead,” Jeritha said. “See—you can already see the lights from Drendell.”

  Stone risked a quick look. She was right: up ahead, a wide nest of lights twinkled from the ground. He wanted to be relieved, but couldn’t yet—not while that winged monster still had them in its sights. At least if it came after them once they’d landed, he could deal more effectively with it, and Jeritha’s navigator duties would no longer constrain her.

  “Hold on,” Errin snapped, and touched a control on the dash. The airship slowed to almost a full stop, hovering fifty feet or so above the ground, and then began a slower, elevator-like drop straight down. “Is that thing still out there?”

  Stone checked again, using magical sight to supplement his mundane vision. “Damn!”

  The wyvora was approaching them again, still higher in the air but closer. It moved more cautiously this time, but seemed to have recovered from Stone’s last fireball. “I’ll get it.”

  “Let me,” Jeritha said. She twisted in her seat and fixed her attention on the beast, her face wreathed in a look of calm concentration.

  The wyvora screeched again, but this time it almost sounded like a question instead of a challenge. As the ship landed with a thump on the rocky ground, it beat its massive wings a few times, indecisive, and then streaked off into the night.

  39

  For a few moments, the tiny cabin was silent as its three occupants waited for their jangling nerves to calm. “Well…” Errin said at last, unhooking her seat restraint, “that was…quite a bit more eventful than I’d hoped.”

  “But at least we’re in one piece,” Stone said. “And the ship is still functional. It is still functional, right?”

  “As far as I know. We can stay here and I can check it out, but it will take time. Time I’d rather not take right now,” she added with a glance toward the distant city.

  “No,” Stone agreed. “We need to get Harrison out of there before they find out we’re looking for him and move him someplace we can’t reach.”

  “Exactl
y my thought.” Errin set a few controls on the dashboard, then pushed herself free of the seat. “Once we have him back, between the two of us we can fix any minor problems, magical or mechanical.”

  “Will the illusions and whatnot keep the ship safe?” Stone asked. He followed her out, glancing around at the dark, rocky terrain surrounding them. “It looks a bit…exposed out here.”

  “Like I said before—nobody comes out this far. The illusions and wards will keep any scavenging animals away. And if we do this right, we won’t be gone long.”

  “Some of my people aren’t far from here,” Jeritha said. “They won’t come near your ship, though.”

  “I guess it’s as safe as we’re likely to be,” Stone said, though he wished he felt as confident as he sounded.

  Errin already had the cargo bay open and was going through the boxes and bags, arranging gear in a backpack. “Just give me a few minutes to get this together and we can go.”

  “What all have you got in there?” Stone watched with interest as she continued stuffing small mechanical and electronic devices into the pack.

  “Some things I’ve been working on with Trevor. Some of them are weapons—you saw one in action back at the Underground. A few are more experimental.” She held up a metal box about the size of a large paperback book. “This is an illusion generator, for example—it creates a small area of invisibility, but only for a couple of minutes. And this one,” she added, pulling out something that resembled a small box with a metal screen over one end, “creates a magic nullification field. It’s really tricky, though—we’ve never been able to get it to work for longer than a second or two before it fails.”

  “Magic nullification field?” Stone switched to magical sight and examined the little thing, which appeared inert at the moment. “How does that work?”

  “It disrupts the flow of magical energy in a specific way around an individual person. It would take me a long time to explain it—the basic idea is that magic is a form of energy, just like any other type. Any kind of energy can be manipulated, but the problem is you have to be able to access it before you can do it. Trevor and I have been working on it for a while now, to give non-magical people a weapon against the mages. I wouldn’t trust it with our lives, though—not without a lot more testing.”

  “Wait a minute…” Stone said as she slipped it through a loop inside her pack.

  “What?”

  He sharpened his gaze as his mind returned to the scene from a few hours ago. “Could the mages—the Talented—have that technology?”

  Errin stiffened. “Why do you ask?”

  “Do you think that’s what they did to Harrison? Maybe that bomb they set off wasn’t just a bomb. What if it incorporated some kind of magic damping effect? If they could take down his magic even for a few seconds—especially if they injured and disoriented him with the bomb—then that would give them enough time to knock him out. And after that…” He shuddered, thinking again about the alchemist couple.

  Errin considered her answer carefully, but her aura betrayed her tension. “I wouldn’t have thought so—like I said before, the Talented aren’t innovators as a rule. They don’t need to be. Anything they want to do, they can do with magic.”

  “Not as a rule,” Stone agreed. “But is it possible?”

  “Of course it’s possible. And if they did have people capable of that, you can be sure they’d be working for the authorities—voluntarily or otherwise.” She let her breath out. “Damn. We need to get going.” She reached into another of the boxes, withdrew a long, hooded gray cloak, and offered it to Jeritha, who’d been watching them in silence. “Here—you should put this on. It’s not safe for you to be seen. Let’s go.”

  After giving the ship one last check to verify the wards and illusion generators were functioning, they set off toward the distant glow of Drendell. Stone didn’t know what time it was now, but from the look of the sky they had perhaps another hour or two before dawn.

  They walked for several minutes in silence, each alone with his or her own thoughts. They moved with care, watching their footing; the rocky, dry terrain was riddled with treacherous holes and dropped off frequently, and they didn’t want to give themselves away by using lights. Stone and Errin stumbled several times, but Jeritha traversed the hazards almost as if they weren’t there. Stone wondered how much more she was seeing than he was, even with magical sight.

  Before long, their surroundings gave way from rock and scrubby dead grass to the blasted-out ruins of buildings. Out here at the leading edge of where Drendell used to stand, the ruins were little more than foundations, with the occasional part of a crumbling wall, but Stone spotted the rising forms of half-intact structures ahead. He still saw no sign of human habitation.

  “What do we do when we get into town?” he muttered. “Are we meeting someone at a specific place? Contacting them?”

  “We’ll make contact at a designated location,” Errin said. “It’s one we use sometimes for meetings. We’ll need to check it carefully first, though.”

  “Do you trust this person we’re talking to? It’s not—the man himself, is it?” he added, avoiding the use of Olystriar’s name even though it was unlikely anyone was listening to them out here.

  “No. It’s one of his agents. He’s as suspicious as we are, since he has every bit as much to lose if we betray him.”

  “What about Galen?”

  “When Kira contacted our agent, she told him to keep a lookout for him, and to take him into custody if he turned up. We should be able to handle him, though—he’s not a mage.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine what would cause him to betray us.”

  “We don’t know he did yet, remember. Perhaps he—” Stone stopped.

  “What?”

  “Shh. I thought I heard something.”

  All of them stopped moving. Stone switched on magical sight, scanning the area around him.

  “There,” Jeritha whispered, pointing ahead of them.

  Stone followed her line of sight to a squat, crumbling building. “I don’t see—”

  Something—several somethings—leapt over a low wall and streaked toward them.

  “Bloody hell!” Stone backpedaled as he recognized the forms: a pack of the mutant wolf-creatures that had nearly killed him after the Temolan Guard had dumped him outside Drendell. He counted at least five of them, and though he couldn’t get a good look in the pre-dawn dimness, his magical sight gave him the impression of unwellness.

  Each one looked subtly different: some larger, some smaller, all of them skinny and mangy with malevolent glowing eyes and open, drooling mouths. One had a vestigial head like the one he’d seen before, and another had several nonfunctional limbs hanging off its patchy sides.

  Next to him, Jeritha and Errin were already in action. Errin pulled something from one of her vest pockets and aimed it at one of the creatures, but didn’t fire yet.

  Jeritha raised her hands and focused intently on a large, shaggy form at the other end of the pack. After a moment it shook its head violently as if a cloud of insects had materialized around it, then growled and darted off.

  The others kept coming. Stone pulled up a shield around himself and the others, directing a wide-angle concussion spell at the three in front. It hit two of the creatures, sending them tumbling backward with yelps of confusion.

  The other one propelled itself above the spell with a mighty leap, only to slam into the shield. Stone got a brief impression of unhinged malevolence in the thing’s eyes, before a blast sounded from his right and the creature fell back, the top of its head missing.

  One of the remaining creatures, either more intelligent or more cautious, held back. It fixed its attention on Stone, its glowing red eyes meeting his, and then let loose with a keening howl.

  Stone’s body went rigid, and he couldn’t move.

  No, no! In horror, he remembered what had happened when he’d first encountered these things—how his body had seized up. At th
e time he’d thought it was either fear or simple injury and exhaustion, but this was the same thing now. His heart pounded in panic as the thing’s skinny hindquarters bunched in preparation to leap—

  He couldn’t see what was happening to his left, he recognized Jeritha’s voice as she barked a sharp command. The creature instantly calmed, and the hold on Stone broke.

  Panting, he backed off as the wolf-thing cast a final glare at him, then one at Jeritha, and then slunk off back toward its hiding spot.

  “Come,” Jeritha said with some urgency. “We need to get away from here before they bring more of their pack.”

  Stone and Errin didn’t have to be told twice. They picked up their pace and hurried forward; as the sun began to rise they could already see the taller structures that made up the edge of the city proper only a short distance ahead.

  “What the hell are those things?” Stone demanded, glancing back over his shoulder with magical sight, half-convinced the whole diseased pack of them would be bearing down on his group. So far, his experiences with Calanar’s wildlife had not been positive. “A couple of them nearly killed me when I got dumped outside town a while back.”

  “It’s the magic,” Jeritha said. “The war magic. It affected the animals even more than the people. A lot of them died, but many were—changed.”

  “Still?” Stone asked. “It’s been a long time since the war, right? Are there still this many mutant animals running around? They don’t breed that way, do they?” The thought of any of those horrific things managing to put up with each other long enough to mate made him shudder.

  “It’s magic,” the Traveler said again. “It corrupts them. We avoid them when we can—they aren’t usually brave enough to attack our bands, but if they do, we deal with them. They deserve pity, honestly.” Her delicate features twisted in disgust. “It wasn’t their fault, what happened to them. They’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been left with.”