Steel and Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  “So now we wait,” Stone said, resuming his pacing.

  “Yes. That’s the hardest part.”

  The hour crawled by. Jeritha returned to the bed for more rest and Errin sat at the table tinkering with her devices, but Stone couldn’t sit still. He stalked the small confines of the apartment, glancing at the clock every couple of minutes and pausing frequently at the windows to peer out through the cracks in the blinds using magical sight, convinced a group of Talented agents had surrounded them and were preparing to attack.

  No such thing happened, though, and eventually Errin stood and gathered her tools into her pack. “Let’s go. This address isn’t far.”

  Jeritha rose gracefully and pulled her cloak back on. “I don’t sense anyone nearby,” she said. “We should be safe.”

  Stone wasn’t so sure, but she seemed to have a greater sensitivity for such things than he did, so he followed the others out.

  Now, at midmorning, more people were out and going about their day’s activities. Nobody paid the old car any attention as they drove to the new address, another apartment building down yet another narrow side street. This time they had to park out front. Stone put a disregarding spell on the car, and Jeritha checked out the interior before they went in.

  Inside, they found a large box and a smaller one in the corner of the front room, hidden under an illusion. After Stone dispelled it, Errin opened the larger box to reveal three paper-wrapped parcels. She opened the first one and held up a long, high-collared black coat trimmed in electric blue. Her lip curled in disgust. “I know it’s necessary, but it’s going to be hard to wear one of these ridiculous outfits and keep a straight face.” She handed the coat to Stone. “I think this one’s yours.”

  “I completely agree about wearing that,” Stone said. He took the coat and looked it over. It included several small pins on the lapels, similar to the ones he’d seen before. This was the first time he’d seen them up close, though: each one sported what looked like a magical sigil. “What’s with the blue, anyway? Every one of these bastards I’ve seen has either worn a blue coat or another color with blue highlights.”

  “It’s Temolan’s color,” Errin said. “All the mage houses have a color and a symbol associated with them. The houses require their affiliated mages to wear the symbol—it’s part of their identification. The color’s more of a fashion choice, but most of them do it out of pride.”

  “Ah, to show which team they cheer for,” Stone said, shaking his head. “I should have expected that lot to be a bunch of pathetic conformists.” He slipped the coat on; at first it seemed a little too snug, but he tensed as the thing shifted on its own and settled around him as if it were a live thing trying to get comfortable. When it stopped moving, it now fit like it had been tailored for him.

  “Nice trick,” he admitted grudgingly. “I’ll have to work on a spell like that back home.” He spread his arms. “So, how stupid do I look in this thing?”

  Errin tilted her head. “It suits you, actually. No insult intended.” She removed another coat, brown with dark blue trim, and offered it to Jeritha. Like Stone’s, it conformed perfectly to her body when she put it on.

  “No coat for you?” Stone asked Errin.

  “I won’t be able to pass as a Talented, so my role will be as your servant.” She sighed, looking resigned as she pulled a rough-looking set of clothes from the box. “I hope you’re good at playing an arrogant bastard, because you’ll need to keep me safe if anyone else gets out of line. You’ll also have to treat me like I’m not worth your time, so they don’t get suspicious.”

  Stone closed his eyes. “I can do arrogant with the best of them—but cruelty will be difficult.”

  “Remember our mission. We’ll do what we have to do.” She went back to digging in the large box. Also inside the box were the remainder of Stone’s and Jeritha’s outfits: rich-looking shirts and boots, with trousers for Stone and a long skirt for Jeritha. Like the other Talented’s clothing Stone had seen, these appeared to have been enchanted to repel dirt and keep them crisp and bright.

  “Keep an illusion over those until we’re ready to leave,” Errin said. “They’ll draw too much attention in Drendell.”

  “What’s in the smaller box?” Stone asked.

  She opened it and spread the items on the table. There were two signet rings, a sheaf of papers, three stiff cards, and two small leather bags, each of which contained a quantity of shiny gold and silver pyramid-shaped objects.

  “Is that money?” Stone picked up one of the gold ones. It had writing stamped into all of its sides, including one of the sigils displayed on his jacket’s pins.

  “Yes.” Errin handed each of them a ring and a card, and pocketed the other card. “These are identification for the Talented—the ring and the card together. Both of them are magical.”

  Stone shifted to magical sight and examined them. Both glowed with faint magic, and when he slipped the ring on his finger, it radiated warmth for a moment and then settled in to match his aura. The card made the same change. “Nice one. Seems a bit…insecure, though. So all someone would have to do is steal some of these and they imprint on their wearer?”

  “No, not exactly. From what I understand, the issuing authority has to prepare them to do that. The blanks won’t work on their own. That’s why our friend is so important.”

  “No image?”

  She chuckled. “No point. When people can make themselves look like whatever they want—especially when they don’t like their true form getting around—an ID photo would be useless. Besides, you can’t fake an aura, right?”

  “It’s quite difficult, at least where I come from.” He unfolded the sheaf of papers, which were covered in the same flowing, elaborate print he’d identified as the Talented’s written language. “Is it going to be a problem that I can’t read any of this?”

  “Shouldn’t be. If all goes well, we won’t be there long. I can read some of it. Can you, Jeritha?”

  “A bit. Not much.”

  “We’ll be fine. I’ll read the signs, and you do whatever you need to do so nobody uses me for target practice.”

  “How are we going to get to Temolan?” Stone asked. “I don’t know how to operate the teleport pads, and I assume Jeritha doesn’t either.”

  “If our IDs hold up, it won’t be a problem. We’ll have to pass through a checkpoint, but the pads operate automatically. The ones from the surface cities only go to one location in the public area. Ah! I forgot.” She fished in one of her vest pockets and withdrew three small objects. “These are something else Trevor and I came up with a while back. Alastair, can you attune them to us?”

  Stone took them and studied them. They appeared to be gold drops with clips on them. “Earrings?”

  “Right. They’re communication devices, designed to only work between those they’re attuned to. They have a very short range, but we shouldn’t be apart anyway.”

  Stone shifted to magical sight and instantly spotted the magic swirling around the little devices. Attuning them to himself and his friends was similar to what he’d done with the illusion generators he’d built before. He clipped one on his ear and gave the others back.

  “Is it working?” Errin’s voice sounded in Stone’s ear, crisp and clear even though she’d barely moved her lips.

  “Very nice. I’m definitely going to need to spend some time with you lot after we get this all sorted out.”

  “I hope you’ll have the chance,” she said at normal volume, her expression sobering. “We should go. I want to get to Temolan and meet our contact soon, so we’ll have time to prepare for tonight.”

  Stone glanced out the window again, shifting back to magical sight and wishing he could shake the feeling that someone was out there watching them.

  41

  “Are you two ready for this?” Errin asked.

  They sat in their battered vehicle, parked a block down from a trim, two-story building in the heart of Drendell—the locati
on of the teleportation pad that would take them to Temolan.

  “I just want to get on with it at this point,” Stone said. Like the others, he now wore his disguise, and had wreathed all three of them in a disregarding spell. He glanced at Jeritha, whose illusion spell hid her gray complexion and silvery-green hair; she was now pale and green-eyed, with a dark-auburn bob.

  “I hate to do this to you—a lot of it is going to be on you and your magic, and that makes me nervous so soon after you’ve got it back. But we don’t have a lot of choice. I hope our contact in Temolan can help us more when we reach him.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Stone said. “Let’s do it before I lose my nerve.”

  It was mid-day so they had no hope of waiting for the street to be empty, but they did take careful looks around—physical, technological, and magical—to make as sure as possible no Talented were nearby. Stone and Jeritha used a tricky combination of magic to hide their exit from the vehicle and keep them invisible until they ducked into a side street, then dropped the spell so they could stride from that direction toward the building.

  As disgusted as it made him to do so, Stone called up his mental images of the Talented he’d interacted with and did his best to channel their attitude of entitled arrogance. He drew himself to his full height and walked with purpose, keeping Errin in sight at all times. Jeritha walked on the other side of Errin, maintaining the same demeanor even though Stone knew she hated it as much as he did.

  The building was in much better repair than the others near it, and it wasn’t hard to sense the magical traces in and around it. Stone and the others swept through the door, trying to look like they knew where they were going.

  Inside, a large open atrium was flanked on either side by glass-walled office cubicles. On the left side, a sweeping staircase led to the second floor. The walls were painted the same pleasant cream Stone had seen in some of the Temolan buildings, while the floor was blue stone with silver accents. Artwork—probably the Talented’s answer to the sort of inoffensive modern art employed on the walls of every office building in Earth’s corporate sector—hung at intervals, and several small, bright chandeliers floated languidly high above them with no visible tethers to the building. Everything in here was as immaculately clean as the mages’ outfits.

  The lower floor wasn’t crowded; Stone spotted perhaps fifteen people in all. Most went about their business without paying any attention to those coming and going, while three—two Talented and one whose rougher outfit marked him as non-magical—waited in two separate lines near the middle of the open floor. Ahead, past a silver railing, Stone spotted a large teleport pad flanked by a man and a woman in identical blue coats. As they hung back and watched, another long-coated woman entered, strode past them, and took her place at the end of the Talented’s line. The two attendants directed each of the Talented in turn to the teleporter pad, and only when they’d all disappeared did they wave the non-magical man up. They examined his identification much more closely than they had the others’, their faces wreathed in distaste. Stone noticed they didn’t touch his papers, but levitated them in front of them.

  “Bloody bastards…” he muttered.

  “Stay calm,” Errin murmured back, watching as the non-mage stepped onto the platform and disappeared. “We should go while no one else is here. Make it look good.”

  Stone took a moment to calm his aura, then set his expression to the kind of cold unapproachability he used when he wasn’t in the mood to interact with anyone back on Earth. He gave Errin a gentle magical shove and was pleased when she stumbled forward as if he’d pushed her much harder, then strode up to the pad.

  The two uniformed Talented flicked an annoyed gaze at Errin, then focused on Stone. “Identification, please,” the man said. He sounded bored.

  Stone handed over his card, then held out his hand with the signet ring as he’d seen the previous Talented do. The scan seemed to take forever, but after only a couple of seconds the man nodded once. “You’re cleared. Who is…this?”

  “She’s my servant. I had some errands in Drendell.”

  “Do you have her identification?”

  “You heard the man,” Stone snapped to Errin. “Show him your identification.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said meekly, and pulled it from her pocket.

  This time, the man didn’t take the papers, but levitated them as he had with the other non-magical man. He glanced over them, then at the bag she carried. “What is in that bag? Let me see.”

  “The bag is mine,” Stone said, injecting as much imperiousness into his tone as he could manage and meeting the man’s gaze directly. “I didn’t feel the need to carry it when she can.”

  The man considered and nodded with a sly smile. “Of course not. It’s all the Dim are good for, after all—manual labor. Have a pleasant day.”

  “And you as well,” Stone said. He didn’t do it through gritted teeth, which was a victory.

  Meanwhile, Jeritha had no trouble getting past the female attendant. Stone shoved Errin forward again and the three of them stepped on to the platform.

  The Talented’s teleportation pads weren’t as smooth as the ones at the Nexus; Stone felt an electric jolt similar to the half-remembered sensation when the Guard had originally taken him to the surface. A moment later, they stood in a large, open area with soaring ceilings, more floating lights, and long-coated people bustling back and forth.

  “Grand Central Station,” Stone muttered as they stepped off the pad, hoping the earring device would deliver his words to his friends. On either side, several more pads disgorged more people, all of whom immediately strode away. Stone noticed that the few unaccompanied people dressed in work clothes headed in a different direction than the others.

  “This is the central public area of Temolan,” Errin told him as they joined the throng. “No one who isn’t sworn to the Temolan mage house is allowed outside this district without special permission—mages or non-mages. The exception is the workers, whose identification gives them access to the specific other parts of town where they need to be. If they’re caught outside those areas, they’re subject to exile or execution.”

  Stone didn’t doubt that. “Where are we going? Do they have cabs or anything here, or has someone arranged transportation?”

  “Most people don’t use personal transportation in the public area—the hovertrain goes around the perimeter of the city, and there are more configurable teleportation pads once you get out of the public sector.”

  “So we walk, then? Do you know where we’re headed?”

  “Yes. Our contact left me a map. Let’s get out of sight and then we can get our bearings. I’ve never been to Temolan before. I’m assuming you haven’t either, Jeritha?”

  “No,” she said, obviously fighting hard to keep her nervous disgust from showing as she looked around at the tall, cream-colored buildings. The soaring structures were beautiful—whoever had designed them had obviously put as much of a premium on aesthetics as on function—but also gave an uncomfortable feeling of looming over the crowds below, as if preparing to pounce on anyone unworthy of being in their presence. Even the rows of delicate trees planted along the spotless streets seemed somehow sinister in their perfect alignment.

  “Is our contact meeting us in the public area?” Stone asked. He wondered if the Talented who lived in the city experienced the looming feeling too, or if it was a byproduct of knowing one didn’t belong here and wasn’t welcome.

  “Yes. They have buildings with accommodations for visitors from other cities—we’re meeting him at one of those. Our identification should get us out of the public area, but I don’t want to test it until we’ve made contact with him.”

  They chose a secluded corner of a small sidewalk café, sitting at an outdoor table. Stone went inside and got drinks (reluctantly heeding Errin’s suggestion to bring her only a simple glass of water) and then refreshed the disregarding spell as he sat back down. At least the money hadn’t been a p
roblem—he’d watched the customers in front of him and handed over one of the silver-colored pyramids in payment, receiving a few copper ones in change.

  Between the three of them, they managed to identify their current location on the map, and from there to determine where they needed to end up. Fortunately the public area was not large—only a few blocks around the outer edge of the city—so they wouldn’t have to walk far.

  “How many people are in one of these cities?” Stone asked. “What’s the mage population like in comparison to the non-mages?”

  “Nobody’s done an exact count,” Errin said. “But the mages number a fraction of the non-magical people. Our best estimate is that each of the floating cities has thirty to fifty thousand people, with around ten times that for the surface cities.”

  Stone wondered how many Travelers there might be, but didn’t want to ask where they might be overheard. “So if the non-magical people ever got themselves sorted and made an effort—”

  “Not likely any time soon.” Errin took a quick glance around before lowering her gaze again like a good servant. “Most of the non-magical people are, if not content with their situation, too scared to do anything about it. And sadly, a lot of them do live up to the name ‘Dim.’ They want nothing more than to do their work, raise their families, and stay as far away from any conflict with the mages as they can.” Another quick glance. “Best if we don’t talk about that here, though. We should get going. I don’t like being out in the open like this.”

  They left the restaurant and headed up the street. Stone kept the disregarding spell up and forced himself not to look at every person they passed; instead, he kept his purposeful gaze straight ahead as if intent on some important business. He was glad Jeritha was small and slight, which gave him a valid excuse to slow his normally brisk pace. Nobody paid any attention to them, not even the uniformed guard standing at a corner halfway to their destination. Stone tensed a little as they walked by, but the man seemed to be looking at something across the street and ignored them.