by Anton Strout
“But how?” Kejetan shouted, still struggling in vain to free himself.
“Allotropy,” Caleb said, holding the purple vial up. “You hired me, Kejetan, because you needed an alchemist, and what is alchemy really but a science most people don’t understand. For instance, take allotropy. An allotrope allows for elementary substances in material matter, like say those found in steel, to exist in other forms, such as stone. Superman crushes a piece of coal; the allotropes help it become a diamond. Same principles at work here. Steel, meet stone!”
“This fight was only the distraction,” I said, “keeping you and your men occupied down here in the depths of the ship.”
Marshall held up his spray container. “There’s a lot more where this came from,” he said. He shook the container, the contents of it sloshing around. “Actually, there’s not much more of it left. Almost all of it is coating your ship, sadly.”
Kejetan shook his head.
“Tricks,” he said, struggling. “Your potions and concoctions are limited in their uses, alchemist, offering nothing more than a delay.”
“You’d be surprised,” Caleb said, stoppering the vial. He slid it back inside his coat. “A little goes a long way, and it doesn’t take much for the structural modifications of the elements to spread. Just a jump to the left. You hired me because I was good, remember?” Caleb turned to me, giving a deep bow. “My lady, the ship is yours.”
I began to thank him, but Kejetan would not let me speak.
“It is not hers,” he shouted. “It is mine. Or would you rather have my men tear your dear Stanis apart as you watch?”
Kejetan had charged me before, but his men had stayed their ground, Stanis still strung up among them, caught in their grasp.
“It seems, Miss Belarus—much like when I stole Stanis away from you the first time—that we are at an impasse. Harm me, and my men will have no other choice but to end Stanis. I no longer care for the miserable cur. It has become more than clear that he is no longer one of my kin.”
“Nor would I ever wish to be,” Stanis said. My heart went out to him, stretched out in submission among the other gargoyles.
I looked to Rory, who had already assembled her pole arm. A vial of her own appeared out of her coat, and she applied its contents liberally to the bladed end.
“You sure that’s going to help?” I whispered to Caleb, and he nodded in response. Her blade hadn’t always been the best weapon against stone, but this concoction was supposedly going to change all that. Now I just had to make sure I had the power to pull off the rest of this.
I turned my attention away from all other things back to Kejetan.
“Release me, and you can have my worthless son once more as yours,” he said, a nervousness behind his attempts to bargain with me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “We’ve done this dance before, remember?” I pulled my own notebook from my pocket, letting my anger grow as I turned to the spell I had marked out in detail there. “You broke into my home last year, threatening my family. Stanis gave his own freedom over to protect us, to take you away from us, but, no, that wasn’t a permanent enough solution. All that did was buy us time, and right about now, I think a more permanent solution is in order.”
At my command, Rory leapt forward, winging her pole arm at the gargoyle closest to her. The blade came down as the creature raised its claws to block it, catching it between two of its fingers. Like a hot knife through butter there was barely any resistance, and the blade slid down through its hand and the center of its arm. Everything below the gargoyle’s elbow fell away in two pieces, which crumbled when they hit the floor.
However, even with that advantage, their numbers were too many, and I needed to act fast if we were going to keep from getting overwhelmed.
Already, the rest of the other gargoyles began pulling Stanis’s limbs in four different directions. The strength of his wings knocked some of them back from him, but not enough were falling away in the struggle.
“Your men aren’t going to hurt Stanis anymore,” I said, pushing my will further out into the immediate surroundings of the throne room and the changing steel-stone of the ship. My body began to thrum with the almost overwhelming connection to it. “Your men have bigger fish to fry.”
“Meaning what exactly?” Kejetan asked, lashing forward with his wings in a last, desperate attempt to attack, but he was still not able to reach any of us.
“Oh right, I forgot,” I said, reaching out with my mind to slam shut the two other doors leading out of the room, the once-metallic clang of them sounding like a stone coffin sliding shut. “You ancient types have trouble with idioms like ‘bigger fish to fry.’ It means Stanis isn’t their biggest problem right now.”
The only door left for escape was the one behind me and my friends, and Marshall was already running for it as he unscrewed the top of the spray canister and spilled its remaining contents along our path out of the throne room.
“This,” I continued, letting my will loose on all the steel-stone spread out in front of me, “is their biggest problem. First, I’m going to crush this room in around you like a balled-up prison, so you can’t escape. Then I’ll fold the rest of this ship in around you until it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.”
The floor and walls were alive to me by then, the connection complete. I reached out to it, and it responded to my command. The floor beneath the gargoyles began to twist and buckle, the wrenching sound of metal fatigue and the grinding of stone filling the room as the walls pulled in to surround Kejetan and his men.
Many of the gargoyles holding Stanis broke away and began scattering around the room to push back against the walls that were pushing in, but several of them were still on him. With the numbers of captors thinned, Stanis struggled to break free, his wings thrashing about him.
“Stand still!” Rory called out to him, poised for action, holding her pole arm over her head, hesitant to take a swing with it. “Stanis, I’m serious!”
I lent her a hand, steadying the buckling floor directly beneath Stanis for a moment, allowing the gargoyle a bit more control of his movement. Instead of struggling, he pulled his wings in tight around him, making his body as small a target as he could.
Rory’s blade made quick work of removing the arms of the gargoyle to Stanis’s right, which freed his other arm enough that he lashed out with his claws at the remaining ones on his left. Roars of pain echoed throughout the room. But, in the end, Stanis was free.
Instead of coming to us, he turned, stepping toward his father.
“I do not know what you truly hoped,” he said to Kejetan. “We stopped being family centuries ago when you killed Alexander’s son and forced him into your servitude and when you ended my own life. I was willing to be taken into servitude by you as well, to protect them and to buy them time, hoping I could dissuade you from your madness, but the truth is that a man such as you will never be satisfied. You would try to bend this modern world to your will, never giving up on obtaining the knowledge you do not justly deserve to have.”
“We could have lived as gods to them,” Kejetan said.
“And that is your true failing,” Stanis said. “We are still human born. No better than they. What you consider your calling, I consider madness.”
“Stanis,” I called out, feeling the use of my will beginning to take its toll as it drained me. “We need to go. Like, now.”
More and more of the ship was crushing in behind them, and it was taking every last part of me to keep it from adding Stanis to it all.
“Kill me, then,” Kejetan said, turning to me.
“No,” I shouted. “Back away, Stanis.” At my word, the gargoyle stepped away from Kejetan and toward me, his eyes still fixed on his father. When Stanis stood by my side, I spoke again. “I will not give you the dignity of death. Truthfully, I’m not sure if I could kill you. I might si
mply destroy this form you sought so hard to get all these centuries, but what of your spirit? Would it find another vessel?”
There was nothing but pure disgust on Kejetan’s face now. “Your lack of commitment will leave you undone,” he said.
“For generations, my family has either been hunted or suffered by your hand,” I said. I pressed my will into the steel-stone at his feet, crumpling the floor up over the lower half of his body, encasing him further. “And now, for generations it will be yours to suffer instead. You finally have the physical form you desire, but it will do you nothing.” I turned to Stanis. “You don’t technically breathe, correct?”
“This is true,” he said. “I do not.”
“Good.” I stepped toward Kejetan, still keeping well out of the reach of his wings, which were already partially trapped beneath the metal of the collapsing room.
“Do you have any idea how cold and dark it is at the bottom of the ocean?” I asked, watching his eyes widen but not waiting for an actual answer. “No sound, no one to rule . . . losing all freedom of movement, the ability to fly. No control, whatsoever.”
“No!” he shouted, his usual air of authority finally replaced with open fear.
“You’ve had more than a lifetime to choose your course,” I said. “The only ‘good’ to come from you was Stanis. Now you’ll have a lifetime to contemplate those choices. At the bottom of the sea.”
I expected rage. I expected pleading, screaming. I did not expect silence, which almost caused me to lose my angered emotional hold on my spell. Faltering for a second, I let the thoughts of what Kejetan might have wrought on this world fuel me. The corpses of my friends, the shattered remains of Stanis, and yes, even Caleb’s lying dead at my feet. All those images filled my mind’s eye, sticking my conviction to the spell.
“Lexi!” Rory called out from the doorway behind us. “Out, now or never!”
“Go,” I whispered to Stanis through gritted teeth.
“Farewell, Kejetan the Accursed,” he said to the man who had once been his father. Without another word, he turned and walked past me to Rory.
With the room clear of my friends, I backed my way out of it, rolling my will over it, trapping Kejetan and his fellow gargoyles in twists of crumpled steel-stone. I focused all my will to compress it in as tight as I could. Soon, the sight of anyone in the room was lost to me, but I kept compressing bit after bit of steel in on itself. My legs shook with the effort, the press of my nails digging into my palms, my body on the edge of collapse.
As I passed through the doorway of the throne room out into the rest of the ship, stone arms scooped me up into a carry.
“I have you,” Stanis said. “Do what you must.”
The five of us backed through the rest of the freighter while I continued collapsing everything that was in our wake.
Rory and Caleb took on any stragglers we came across, although at this point the bulk of those belowdecks still seemed to be of the human-servant variety, the newborn gargoyles having had at least the smarts to leave a sinking ship.
The freighter continued to collapse, and I fought to block out thoughts of the enormity of the task, as Caleb had so often instructed me.
And he had been right, too, about how a little of his alchemical mixes went a long way. I had been worried we hadn’t mixed enough Kimiya to affect the whole of the ship, but every time I thought the connection to the balled-up steel-stone would give out, I felt more of it come to life as the alchemical process continued to spread, like a virus, throughout the entire ship. I folded deck after deck in on itself as we worked ourselves higher and higher through the freighter, until we emerged on the ship’s already tilting top deck.
“Holy crapballs,” Marshall called out behind me.
“What?”
“Just . . . look.”
I turned my head. The deck of the ship was pure chaos. Human Servants of Ruthenia scrambled around, looking for some way off the ship. There were even a few gargoyles left, some not knowing what to do while others struggled to take off from the deck. With so many humans latching on to them, however, their winged forms could not get airborne.
“The diehards stayed with their master,” I said, “but the rats are fleeing a sinking ship.”
“So what now?” Rory asked. “The deck is swarming!”
“Here,” Caleb said, handing her a flask. “Take a sip and pass it around.”
Rory looked unsure. “What is it?”
“You might remember it from the night at the guild hall when I first fought you and Alexandra,” he said. “When I sped myself up.”
It was no doubt an unpleasant memory for Rory, but she drank from the flask nonetheless and passed it to Marshall. I followed, then handed it back to Caleb, who in turn drank from it and offered it to Stanis.
He shook his head. “I do not believe such a thing would work on me,” he said.
Caleb nodded and recapped the flask.
“Run for our ship over the side,” I said. “You should be speedy enough now to avoid conflict. Stanis and I will meet you there.”
Stanis didn’t wait for an answer, and with me still in his arms, he leapt into the air, arcing high above the madness below.
My friends sped across the deck of the ship below at their accelerated rate and I watched their progress as the two of us flew.
“I can take you to the safety of land,” Stanis said.
“No,” I said. “To our boat. We came here together, and we’re leaving together.”
“As you wish,” he said. The words, as always, comforted me, but I pushed comfort away.
I still needed my anger. After all, there was so much more of the freighter for me to collapse in on itself.
Twenty-nine
Stanis
There was a singular happiness in carrying my Alexandra. Had she asked, I might have been able to carry all four of them into the sky, but I thought perhaps trying to get airborne amid all the chaos on the freighter would have proved difficult.
I rose high above before swinging down and around to land on the small boat tethered to the side of the ship. Some of Kejetan’s men had discovered it already in their haste to find any means of escape, a dozen already having boarded it. I slowed our descent by spreading my wings as we dropped onto the still-empty back of the boat and lowered Alexandra.
“First to the party,” she said, still concentrating on the freighter behind me. “Feel free to mop the deck. I need to keep working this spell.” Her voice dropped to a low whisper as the arcane words of the Spellmasons spilled from them.
Standing between her and the fleeing Servants of Ruthenia, I set to work on them, using wings and claws to knock them away. The more I handled, however, the more seemed to board to take their place. The deck of the pitched freighter high overhead was filled with men who, spying our vessel, were quick to jump into the waters all around us.
“Incoming!” I heard Marshall’s voice cry out before spotting him among the jumpers. He hesitated, but Aurora pushed him out over the edge, catching him by surprise.
Aurora followed after him, but the alchemist did not jump.
Caleb drank a vial of an elixir before climbing like a spider down the side of the freighter, losing his grip on it about ten feet above me.
“Damn,” he said, crashing down next to me at the front of the boat. “Thought that one would last longer.”
Before he had a chance to lament it any further, one of the cultists grabbed his leg as he attempted to climb out of the water. Caleb spun and kicked at him, driving the man back.
“We need to leave,” he said.
“No,” Aurora said from the water. She pulled herself up on the vessel after throwing her pole arm onto it. She rolled forward, grabbed the weapon, and came up standing and swinging for more of the men, driving them back from her. “First we need to clear the deck.
”
Marshall came on board with much less grace than Aurora had.
“I’ll work on the leaving part,” he said, heading for the steering wheel at the back of the vessel.
With Alexandra concentrating on crumpling the freighter and Aurora and Caleb by my side, it should not take long to get under way.
Or so I thought. What had Alexandra called them back on the freighter’s deck? Rats fleeing a ship?
Yes, that seemed appropriate. Our ship was teeming with these Servants of Ruthenia.
“This isn’t working,” Marshall called out from the back of the ship, and I turned. The lean human was locked in combat with several of Kejetan’s men, all of them wrestling for control of the wheel. Lashing out behind me as I continued the fight in front of me, I used my wings to brush two of Marshall’s attackers away. The two fell over the edge of the small boat into the water, but two more ran forward to replace them.
Caleb fought the men closest to the bow, his strength augmented and currently the match of my own as his attackers flew through the air with each of his blows that connected with them. He looked up and backed into me as several more cultists landed in the spot he had occupied a second ago.
“Shit,” he said, ducking under one of my wings. He headed back to Alexandra, who was still concentrating on collapsing the freighter.
“What do you want?” Alexandra asked, keeping her eyes focused on the freighter. She ignored him even though the blond man was already inches from her face.
“This,” he said, and moved even closer.
His lips met with hers, her eyes fluttering for a moment before sliding shut, the two of them locked together. Although I could not recall from my human life centuries ago ever experiencing that gesture myself, I had seen it many a time among the humans I had observed over the years. I knew it to be a sign of affection, and while I had no such ability in such matters, something dark and uncomfortable inside me stirred.
Unable to process fully what it was, I took my frustration with it out on one of my attackers, dashing my claws at him with such ferocity that his upper half fell away from his lower, both pieces sliding over the front railing of the ship into the ocean all around us.
