Steel and Stone: A Novel in the Alastair Stone Chronicles

by R. L. King

  Neither got out of the way in time. One of the rocks smashed into the first woman’s head, throwing her back into one of the crystal formations, where the blue fire incinerated her. The other tried a shield—it blocked the rock, but the magical attack ripped through it as if it weren’t there. He screamed and dropped; a moment later, one of the wyvora swooped down, grabbed him in its grasping front claws, and streaked away, trumpeting a shriek of triumph.

  Stone had a half-second to be relieved before more shrieks from the distance sent a chill down his back. He glanced around and froze when he spotted two more of the dragonlike creatures in the distance. “More of them are coming!” he yelled. “What’s calling them?”

  “It’s their vehicle!” Jeritha called. “Something inside is doing it! And we’ve got to get out of here! The manastorm is moving again! It’s coming this way!” Her voice, so calm before, now carried the edges of panic.

  Apparently the last remaining Talented had heard her too. He popped to visibility behind the vehicle, summoning a glimmering shield around both it and himself.

  “How long have we got?” Stone demanded.

  “Minutes. Maybe not that long.”

  “Bloody hell!” Even if they did deal with the wyvora, the war magic that was calling them, and the remaining Talented pursuer, they no longer had a vehicle. How were they going to get away from a fast-moving magical storm?

  First problems first. “Harrison! Let’s take out that shield!”

  At Harrison’s curt nod, Stone gathered magical energy. Even now, in the midst of their dire situation, he couldn’t help but revel at how easy it was. The magic came to him readily, singing through his body with an indescribable feeling. It wasn’t like the kind of rush he got from taking black magic power from others—but he didn’t need that rush anymore. As long as he could do this, he’d never be tempted again. He was certain of it.

  If I live through this. He released the energy at the same time Harrison did, sending it directly at the vehicle. It was just like Jason had told him once, when trying to explain to him how to fight: punch through your opponent, not at him.

  The two massive magical blasts hit the shimmering shield at the same time. It flared bright, then brighter, then vanished. Off to the side, the remaining Talented pursuer let out a loud shriek of pain, staggering from his hiding place and clutching his head. Harrison vaporized him in a gout of searing blue flame.

  Stone immediately switched his focus. They’d taken out the last of the Talented. The vehicle was unprotected now. If they could destroy it, then maybe they could—

  “Stone! Look out!” Tanissa screamed.

  Stone had only a second to register the shadow that had appeared above him, blotting out the weird, shifting aurora-light. Before he could react, something huge and black clamped around him, lifting him off the ground.

  “No!” Errin yelled.

  Stone couldn’t see, but he didn’t have to. He knew what had happened: one of the wyvora had swooped silently down while he’d been focused on the vehicle and snatched him in its claws. He struggled in the thing’s grip as a fetid, rotten-meat stench engulfed him. Where were the others? Why weren’t they shooting at it? He tried to twist in its grip and yelped as one of its claws dug into his shoulder. He had to summon the magic, but his mind wouldn’t settle on the pattern, lock in the necessary formula. It had only been a couple of days since he’d gotten his magic back; apparently the new paradigm wasn’t as second-nature as he’d thought yet. But if he didn’t do something soon, he would—

  What happened next happened fast. He felt the wyvora jerk in a spasm, its claws first tightening around him until he screamed, then releasing him.

  He was falling.

  Only half-conscious now, disoriented, bleeding from a deep wound in his shoulder, he tried to twist his body, to cast a spell, to—

  Pain.

  More than pain.

  White-hot agony, so sharp and sudden and profound that his mind refused to process it. His whole existence shrank to a bright cocoon, and he barely heard the terrified yells of his friends as grayness rose around him.

  What had happened? Had he hit the ground? He must have—he’d been falling. How high up had he been? Why hadn’t anyone caught him? Where was the wyvora? Thoughts, jumbled and fragmented, dashed around his head, whirling until they didn’t even make sense anymore. He tried to struggle up.

  Something wrenched, bringing with it new flowers of agony. Stone’s eyes flew open, and what he saw almost made what was left of his rational mind flee from him.

  He was on his back, looking up into the dancing, multi-colored aurora effect of the sky. But as beautiful as it was, he barely noticed it.

  What he did notice—what he couldn’t miss because it filled every corner of his sight, his mind, his existence—was the sharply pointed, blood-soaked crystalline spike poking up through his chest, and the way his arms, legs, and head dangled, unsupported.

  No no no no no

  His thoughts weren’t even that coherent, though—nothing like bloody hell, I’ve been impaled, or even I’m going to die. He was beyond that kind of rational language. All he had left was pain, and horror, and the creeping, inexorable feeling of his life-force draining away as he knew there was nothing he could do about it.

  Once again he thought he heard his friends screaming something, but their voices blended together and didn’t form recognizable words. Were they coming to help him? Had the wyvora gotten them?

  He didn’t know.

  He didn’t care.

  His fading attention, laser-focused now, was riveted on the bloody spike poking from his chest. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to cough, but that only brought more pain, and more blood.

  Why couldn’t he just die and get it over with?

  And then something else happened.

  He couldn’t explain it. He didn’t try.

  It wasn’t as if the pain disappeared. It was still there, constant and sharp and bright, lancing through him every time he made even the slightest move.

  But now there was something else, too.

  As somewhere off in the distance the sound of his friends’ cries changed, another feeling settled over him, gathering around him. He couldn’t describe it, because he’d never experienced anything like it before. The closest he could get was that it felt like it belonged with him. It pressed in around him, humming with the frequency of some fundamental, primal engine. His arms and legs tingled, and he no longer felt as if they dangled helplessly as the spike held him impaled. His whole body felt electric, as if he had been plugged into the pulsing power source of the universe.

  Somehow, he managed to open his eyes, to raise his head just enough to see. He only managed it for the briefest of moments—perhaps a second or two—but in that short space of time everything changed.

  The spike poking through his body wasn’t streaked with blood anymore.

  Instead, everywhere the bright red of the blood had been was now a luminous, unearthly silver, dancing and arcing around the crystal. More silvery light limned the thing’s edges, flowing out to surround his body like a ghostly aura. Around it, the sky’s aurora grew brighter until the colors flamed with such unearthly intensity that it was impossible to look at them any longer with a mortal gaze.

  Stone clamped his eyes shut, but still the silver and the wild colors refused to recede. They mixed with the pain and formed something new, something extraordinary. Something—

  Screams again.

  Him? Someone else?

  He still didn’t know.

  The dazzling aurora vanished as something heavy and black rose above him, and the ground shook with a freight-train rumble.

  An earthquake rumble.

  An end of the world rumble.

  And then, nothing.

  52

  Voices.

  Muddy and indistinct at first, slowly resolving themselves into coherent words.

  “—waking up—”

  “—all right? Y
ou—”

  “—call him—”

  He opened his eyes, with no idea what he’d see. Nothing? Darkness? A white room?

  A pale, familiar face hovered over him.

  Tanissa. Smiling. “Hello,” she said softly. “How do you feel?”

  That was an important question, but for a moment he couldn’t remember why. When he did finally remember, he jerked upward, his hand flying to his chest, expecting to feel something sharp and pointed sticking through it, or at least a horrific, bloody crater.

  Instead, he felt a blanket, and unbroken skin.

  What?

  How can that—

  Tanissa gently pushed him back down. “You’re all right. Just lie back. You’ve been through a lot.”

  Another figure approached the bed. Stone blinked, and the figure resolved itself into Illona, the healer at the Nexus. She had one of the little rolling constructs with her. Tanissa stepped aside, and she and the construct took a few readings.

  “I’m glad to see you’re awake,” she said. And then the two of them departed, leaving him once more alone with Tanissa.

  “I—” Stone swallowed, and sat up more slowly. This time, Tanissa let him do it, propping him with pillows. His thoughts churned; he wondered if they had him dosed up on so many tranquilizers and painkillers that they could drop a truck on him and he wouldn’t feel it. Had they used an illusion to make his chest appear unmarred, thinking the true reality would have been too much for him to bear without preparation? He touched the center of it again, then looked at Tanissa in confusion. “Where—?”

  “Shh,” she said. She was still smiling. “You’re all right. You’re at the infirmary at the Nexus.”

  “We—made it? But how—?” Nothing made sense. His last memory had left them all in a dire situation: his body impaled on the spiked crystal, the wyvora closing in, the fast-moving manastorm approaching, Jeritha’s band and their own airship too far away to help—how had they escaped all of that?

  The door opened, admitting Errin. She grinned when she spotted him. “Alastair! Illona just called and said you were awake. How do you feel?”

  He shifted his gaze between her and Tanissa, searching for the answer he wanted to give them. Finally he settled for: “Confused.”

  “I can understand that.” She pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. “The last few hours have been pretty confusing for all of us.”

  Stone looked past her. “Where are the others? Harrison? Jeritha? Are they—Did they—?”

  “They’re fine,” she assured him. “Jeritha’s back with her band. She and Tanissa helped heal you.” She patted Tanissa’s arm. “Tanissa’s quite a healer. She’ll be a great addition here. Illona’s already excited to be working with her.”

  Stone swallowed, his mind still reeling with confusion. “But—”

  “Shh…” Tanissa said gently. “It’s been a long day for you. You’ll be fine, but you should rest.”

  She was probably right, but Stone was having none of it. “I want to know what happened,” he said, sitting up more. He couldn’t quite describe how he felt—tired, a little weak, but certainly not anywhere near as bad as he should have felt after everything that had happened. Even the wound where the wyvora had pierced his shoulder was gone, without even a scar to mark where it had been. “How did we get back here? Why aren’t I dead?”

  “You have Tanissa to thank for that,” Errin said.

  “Wait…” he said, still trying to make sense of everything that had occurred. “How can that…be? Is there something wrong with my memory? That thing dropped me—I landed on one of those spikes. I was…” He touched his chest again, like a child poking at a loose tooth to verify it was still there.

  “You were,” Tanissa said gently. “I don’t know how you survived either, honestly. You should have died. You’re a fighter—I’ll say that for you.”

  “But—the manastorm. Those dragon things. How did—”

  Errin gripped his shoulder. “I can see you’re not going to settle down until you get the whole story. What happened was that we were luckier than we had a right to be. All of us. The manastorm was coming, and Jeritha was nearly panicking about what would happen if we didn’t get away from it. But we didn’t have time to get away from it. Our truck wasn’t running, and Trevor blew up the other one. That stopped the wyvora—apparently Jeritha was right about something inside it stirring them up, because as soon as he destroyed it, they took off.”

  “But—what about the storm?” Vaguely, Stone remembered a bizarre sensation washing over him—something electric and primal and pulsing—but he thought it must have been a side effect of the spike piercing his body. “Did it hit?”

  “Trevor used some fancy magic to bring up a section of the ground and make a shelter over us all. So yes, it did hit, but we were protected. He barely made it in time—we were sure it had hit you, but you must have gotten lucky. It tore one of the wyvora to shreds before it could get away. The shelter was Jeritha’s idea—she said it’s a Traveler trick. They sometimes hide in caves or underground shelters to weather the storms when they can’t run from them. When they don’t have anything else, they use magic to create their own.”

  Stone let his breath out. “I still don’t understand how I’m alive,” he said. “How did that spike not—”

  “Like I said—Tanissa’s a talented healer. She must have gotten to you fast enough—even so, it was close. If we hadn’t gotten you back here in time, you probably would have died.”

  That was another question. “How did we get back? Did the storm destroy the airship?”

  “Unfortunately yes, it did.” Errin sounded regretful, almost as if she’d lost one of her own children. “It’s a shame—it will take quite some time to build another one. But at least I learned a few things to incorporate into the new design.”

  “So then how did we get back without it?”

  “Trevor. We had to wait a little while for him to recover enough to do it, but he teleported us all back. All but Jeritha—as I said, her band turned up and she decided to stay with them. They were grateful we saved her, and she said to tell you it was a pleasure to work with you, Alastair.”

  Stone mulled all that over. “Harrison teleported us all back here?”

  “With a bit of help from the Travelers, yes.”

  “Where is he now? Is he all right?”

  “He said he’d see you later today,” Errin said. “He had a few things to attend to with Kira, and Illona insisted he take some time to rest and recover. I’m sure you can tell how well that went over.”

  Stone barely heard the last of her words; his mind wandered again as another thought occurred to him. Tentatively, almost as if he were afraid to try it, he raised a hand and focused on a glass of water sitting on the table next to his bed. With care he formed the pattern in his mind, then breathed a sigh of relief as the glass rose neatly a few inches and hovered there. At Errin’s questioning look, he offered a faint smile. “Just…checking.”

  She chuckled. “You mages are all alike. Anyway,” she added, standing, “we should go and let you rest. If you’re feeling up to it, I’ll see you later today.”

  Stone almost protested that he felt fine, but instead merely nodded. “Thank you both…for everything.”

  “Thank you,” Tanissa said. She indicated the room. “I’d never have believed all this was possible…and I’m here because of you.”

  The two of them moved off, Tanissa to the other side of the room where Illona was working on something at a lab bench with her mechanical “nurse,” and Errin leaving the room with wave of farewell.

  Stone, now alone, took a long drink from the water glass, then sat up the rest of the way and examined his chest.

  The only indication that the crystal spike had pierced him was a tiny scar in the center, about the size of an Earth dime. That was odd—if his memory wasn’t playing tricks with him, the thing had been several times larger at its base. It should have destroyed his hear
t, his lungs—had he somehow drawn sufficient favor from the Universe that it had missed anything vital? That hardly seemed likely.

  At least it hadn’t obliterated the magical tattoo on his left side—even though he didn’t need it any longer to help him channel his black-magic energy, it had taken a lot of talent and effort to produce and he’d grown to like it.

  He closed his eyes, his mind refusing to settle. He was safe now. Against nearly insurmountable odds, they’d managed to navigate through terrain that should have been suicidal, rescue Harrison from the Talented’s custody, and survive a deadly manastorm, war magic, and winged monsters straight out of a nightmare. Hell, he’d survived an injury that should have killed him instantly, with next to no ill effects.

  So, why did he feel so…strange?

  Curious, he shifted to magical sight, wondering if his inexplicable feeling of psychic discomfort might be reflected in his aura.

  What he saw made him stiffen and drop his hand back to the bed.

  He’d expected red flashes, areas where the normally smooth edges of the aura roiled and surged, or even the muddy, muted colors indicating some kind of ill health. None of those would have surprised him, given what he’d experienced.

  What he didn’t expect to see was a third color.

  He blinked and sharpened his focus, sure he had to be mistaken. This kind of thing didn’t happen.

  But there it was, so stark and vivid he couldn’t have confused it for something else.

  The brilliant purple shone as bright as ever closest to his body, with the narrower band of blazing gold surrounding it. Those were normal and expected—he saw them every day when he used magical sight.

  But now a third band, silvery and jagged, snugged up against the golden nimbus. It was even narrower than the gold, but still wide and distinct enough to be clearly visible.