Stonecast tsc-2

by Anton Strout

  His smile was warm as he searched my eyes.

  “Let me guess,” he said, drumming a steady waltzlike cadence on his leg. “One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four . . .”

  I bowed to him. “However did you guess?”

  He gestured from my lips to his. “Does this mean you trust me now? Where are your friends?”

  “I have to trust you at this point,” I said, sobering as my momentary frivolity faded away. “Either you’re going to help me release Stanis from Kejetan’s sway or you’re not. Keeping Rory and Marshall out of that for now is for their own safety.”

  Caleb stepped to the fully finished wings I had been working on, running his hands over them. The mannequin was already gone, and their expanse was simply held up by supports on either side.

  “I’ve given them a final treatment,” he said. “With what little Kimiya is left. You feeling confident about flying after our practice the other night?”

  I nodded, hiding my uncertainty. I hadn’t had to worry last night about anything like flying and dealing with several thousand pounds of gargoyle at the same time . . .

  “Let me worry about the flying,” I said. “You just better come through on your end. We either turn Stanis, or—”

  Caleb was annoyed and already nodding when we were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of movement up on the roof.

  I didn’t need to finish my sentence. I was sick of thinking of Stanis as the enemy.

  I stepped to the wings, pressing my back and shoulders up into the notch of the carved-out harness. The coolness of the stone came through my coat, a chill spiking down my spine. I shivered.

  Caleb looked up at me while he adjusted the placement of the wings on my shoulders. “You okay?” he asked softly.

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying to find my center of balance. The wings were heavy, which I knew they would be, but I braced my legs under the weight of my new burden. “Pull the supports away.”

  Caleb ducked under the wing on my left as he moved to my back and put his hands along the stone stretching out to either side of me, lifting.

  “On your toes,” he said.

  I pushed myself up into the air, the balls of both feet straining from the effort. Caleb pulled the supports free on both sides, and I lowered my feet, spreading my legs to take on the full, crushing weight. Despite my efforts, I wasn’t perfectly centered, off-balance, and I stumbled to my left before correcting myself.

  Caleb worked as my spotter, ready to grab the wings, but I shooed him away.

  “You sure you can do this?” he asked. “I think our mutual frenemy up there might be a bit hostile tonight.”

  The thought of Stanis raging after me through the night sky drained the last of the color from my face. “How exactly did you get him here?”

  “He needed motivation,” Caleb said. “So I gave him one. He knows definitively that you have the book, and he can return it to his master tonight. By the rules Kejetan had me set upon the gargoyle, Stanis had to come, here and now.”

  “He had no choice,” I said, my heart going out to the creature that would just as soon crush me in his claws. “Great.”

  “You sure you can do this?” Caleb repeated.

  “I’m sure,” I said, as anger and a bit of humiliation fueled me. I whispered the words of power over the stone and reached out with my will to either side of me, causing the wings to become malleable and fold in closer, which helped steady me and keep my balance.

  I headed off toward the French doors leading onto the terrace. “You mind your part,” I said. “I’m trusting you on this. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “I won’t,” he said, sounding adamant. “Good luck, and try not to die.”

  I kept silent as I stepped out into the cool night air, focusing on the time I was already counting in my head. The roof proper lay a good fifteen feet above me, but the terrace seemed a much better place to try my takeoff. And if I fucked it up, it would only be a small drop, and I could attempt it again without Stanis’s noticing.

  I extended the back part of my counting mind out into my wings, establishing a rhythm, moving them the way Stanis worked his. The first few passes were clumsy, the wings not working fully in unison, but after a moment, I brought them into alignment.

  On a pure physics level, it seemed unlikely that I could work the massive stone wings into the night sky. Doubt overwhelmed me for a second, but I kept my count steady. I wasn’t sure I would actually get the momentum I needed to do it until I felt my feet lift off the terrace. I cinched the stone of the harness tightly around me before pressing the wings to work harder to rise over the lip of the roof above.

  The accumulated collection of statues had grown even more since I last looked up there, and there was Stanis below, moving one into place at the back row. The sight of him broke my concentration, my flight becoming a bit erratic as I rose higher and higher over the top of the Belarus Building. I needed to focus, to calm myself, and as I did, my flying steadied, and I flew higher until I was looking down over the entire roof and its landscape of silent, stone sentinels.

  Now for the real work.

  “Stanis!” I called down, drawing his attention. He pulled away from the statue, searching the skies until his eyes caught mine. “You care to explain any of this giant chess game you’re arranging on my roof?”

  I was ready for instant attack. Stanis poised himself on the brink of leaping into the air, but to my surprise, he lowered his arms to his side and pulled his wings in. Clearly some small part of him was struggling to maintain control. It gave me hope, but sadly for me, the kind gargoyle was not the one I needed to deal with if we were going to stand any chance of freeing him.

  “Do not provoke me, Alexandra,” he said. “I have warned you of the potential consequences.”

  I had watched Stanis bend his interpretation of my great-great-grandfather’s rules, but at that moment I needed the power controlling him to leave not a spot of wiggle room.

  “Caleb told you I have the secrets your new master is looking for,” I said, slapping my hand onto the front pocket of my coat with my notebook sticking out of it. “And I do. But first? If you want them, you will have to take them from me yourself.”

  Stanis’s face knotted with the struggle, but nonetheless, his wings spread wide.

  “I know not why you would put yourself at such risk, Alexandra,” he said, “but I will have what I have been sent to get.”

  The gargoyle leapt into the air with ferocity, whatever power was controlling him fully taking over.

  Fear jumped up in my throat, but I did not want to find out how ferocious toward me Stanis could actually be.

  I shot up into the night sky, stunned at my own speed, the count of one, two, three, four ever present at the back of my mind, going faster and faster with each repetition. I wasn’t nearly as practiced as Stanis was in the art of flight, but I was ahead of him. That wouldn’t last, but I sped away from the Belarus Building, hoping it would give Caleb the time he needed on the roof.

  Despite my quiet panic, I found myself enjoying the chase. I was flying, after all, of my own volition. Part of me missed the gentle care with which Stanis had held me on our previous flights months ago, but to be flying by myself was a whole different experience, filled with a refreshing and powerful freedom I hadn’t expected.

  As I left Gramercy and hit the lower part of Midtown, I rose higher, soaring well above most buildings there except one: my target. The Empire State Building was awash in a dazzling bright white that night, brighter still at the angle from which I was coming at it. Its luminescence had been my guiding beacon, but it was also my turning point to head back home. I pulled my wings in close as I shot past the building, speeding into the bank of my loop around it, chancing a look back over my shoulder. I’d expected to find Stanis hot on my heels but was relieved to find I had pulled far enough ahead that he was out of sight. As far as speed was concerned, panic was doing an excellent job at keeping me motivated. />
  The changing of the wind as I hit the crosstown side of the building had my hair in my face. I wished I had at least brought a hair elastic with me. But with my wings doing all the work, my hands were free to clear my vision, and I banked around the Empire State Building heading back downtown.

  I needed to keep my lead, and I once again sped up the count in my head. My concentration broke as movement rose in front of me, and I snapped my focus to the looming figure of an oncoming Stanis, claws out and wings pumping away with fury.

  My wings faltered as I lost my count, but I willed them to close tight around me. Immediately I dropped like . . . well, a stone. Stanis flew through the space I’d occupied just seconds ago. His momentum was too much, and he crashed into the side of the building, glass shattering as chunks of stone exploded away from it as his figure vanished inside.

  The debris plummeted down, catching in the netting meant for jumpers and dropped belongings—the reason I had picked the Empire State Building in the first place. The less damage on the ground, the less chance someone would get hurt.

  It would take Stanis a second to right himself, caught within the confines of the building as he was, which thankfully bought me more time. I forced my wings back open, my torso screaming out in the stone harness as the inertia of my falling body met with the resistance of taking flight once more. I grunted as pain spread across the lower part of my rib cage, but I held my concentration and started heading back to the Belarus Building.

  Moments later, the explosion of more glass and stone sounded behind me, but confidence filled me. My lead was greater now. As long as Caleb was ready, we should be good to go.

  As Gramercy Park came into view on my horizon, I circled over the trees, angling back into the space above the Belarus Building. I scoured the rooftop for signs of Caleb, but in the darkness, I couldn’t make him out. The fleeting thought that he might be double-crossing me filled my brain, but I pushed it away. Time would tell on that count, and just then unhelpful thoughts like that were nothing more than distracting.

  Pain shot through me as I suddenly found myself tumbling across the sky, my wings thankfully absorbing much of an impact from behind. Without them, Stanis might have torn me in two, but the concussive force was enough to stun me. My wings fully locked and froze out to either side of me, the aerodynamics of that formation barely keeping me in the air.

  Before I could compose myself, Stanis’s wings and claws were all around me, grabbing me as he spun my body around in midair to face him. I forced my own wings back to life, pressing them between us, the tips driving against his shoulders.

  Stanis’s eyes met mine, and there was anger in them.

  “Why would you do this?” he shouted. “I warned you against telling me where Alexander’s secret lay. Now you force my hand to treat you like my enemy. I do not understand.”

  Hurt rose within me, and I used it to fuel my efforts, flexing my wings to break his hold on me. I don’t think he expected such strength out of me, and, truthfully, I didn’t either, but with my emotions running high, my will was strong, and I pushed away from him, his claws losing their purchase on me. With one giant swoop of my wings, I shot myself above Stanis.

  “I can’t stand seeing you like this,” I said. “You’re not yourself. I don’t know who you have become, but I won’t be afraid of you. I won’t.”

  “But you should be,” he said, rising to catch the tip of one of my wings in his clawed hand. Stanis flapped his own, sending the two of us spinning in a circle. He closed his fist into the structure of my wing, his claws sinking into it until the tip crumbled apart in his hands.

  Broken but free, the centrifugal force of my damaged wing sent me spinning up and away from him. I fought to focus, dropping my count.

  Keeping a steady rhythm wouldn’t help me fly right at present. What I needed was stability, and up there that meant spreading my wings as far as they could go and steadying them. With the tip of one wing gone, I found myself, despite my efforts, slowly slipping into a descending arc back toward Stanis. The physics of flight were winning, whether it be magic-powered or no.

  “Do you see the ease with which I can break you?” he shouted up at me. “You are far more delicate and fragile than that. Do not make me hurt you. Give me the secrets I have come for.”

  “Sorry,” I said, pulling my wings in close to me, immediately plummeting toward him. “But I can’t. And either I save you here and now, or I go down trying.”

  Stanis might have far more experience with flight, but what I hoped for was that he was far less equipped to deal with falling—especially since I was going to be the cause of it.

  I dove straight for him, entirely giving up on controlling my flight and pressing my wings around me into a protective shell. I fell, and with the bulk of my wings sitting as deadweight, I fell fast. I slammed into Stanis. The impact had all the force of an auto accident, and despite bracing myself, my teeth came down hard on my tongue, the fresh and coppery taste of blood filling my mouth.

  Focusing past that, I popped my wings open and entwined them with Stanis’s own. The strength in Stanis’s wings was superior; I felt that. In a slugfest, I’d probably be a smudged red spot on the side of a building already, but I had two things going for me.

  Surprise was still on my side, first by using my new set of wings and actually engaging Stanis in aerial combat. There was no way he had been prepared for that.

  The other was that at that moment, my basic knowledge of physics and gravity were my best friends. Even if Stanis was stronger than me, it didn’t matter in midtumble. If he couldn’t spread his wings, he couldn’t fly, and as long as I concentrated on keeping mine tangled with his, the strength in his couldn’t crush me like a bug.

  The pride in my small bit of triumph, however, didn’t have much of a shelf life. We were, after all, falling out of the night sky at an alarming and accelerating rate. I needed to act, and immediately.

  We were locked together, tumbling, Stanis trying to force my wings away from his, his claws tearing larger and larger chunks out of them. I had to keep mine in motion swirling just out of Stanis’s reach to minimize the damage, but there was another problem.

  The roof was coming up fast, and I was relieved to see Caleb’s now visible X in fresh orange spray paint marking the target zone. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to be the one hitting it first, with Stanis’s entire weight coming down on top of me.

  The tips of my wings shot forward and wrapped themselves just behind Stanis’s shoulders, near the base of his own wings. What I needed was leverage

  Instead of wrestling with Stanis and fighting against his wings, I used his body as an anchor to shift my position around. Using the harness I wore as a focal point, I steered my body out of the danger zone by rolling to my left, pulling our tumble into another revolution. I shifted to my far right to compensate for the spin of our turn, so that Stanis would take the full brunt of the impact. Only in the last seconds did I attempt to disengage my wings from Stanis, hoping to catch a bit of air with them like an emergency parachute.

  And while that seemed like a great plan, Stanis apparently had another, refusing to disengage his own wings from mine. I braced for impact with the rooftop. This wasn’t going to be pretty, not at the speed we were falling.

  Thankfully, Caleb had pulled off his part of the plan. Stanis and I hit the X, but instead of crashing against the roof, the stone gave way like freshly poured concrete.

  Hitting the surface jarred my whole body with pain, but the roof was more trampoline-y than stone had any right to be. The worst of the blow came from the impact of my flesh scraping against the hard stone of Stanis’s body, his wings finally going slack as the two of us sank down into the liquid stone.

  The first time I had seen Caleb pull this arcane trick of his, I had lost a pair of boots in Alexander’s guild hall. With its happening in large scale, I was happy to have it save my life.

  I went to moan, only to find my nose and mouth weren�
�t breathing air. This semiliquid stone went deeper than I had imagined it would, and my face had become submerged in its soupy, gluelike substance. Panicking, I struggled to pull myself out of it, praying that I wasn’t still too firmly entwined with Stanis’s wings.

  My head broke the surface, my mouth gaping wide as I took my first free gulp of air, arms flailing. I fought to get my legs under me, pressing against Stanis’s submerged body to help me stand, but it was like trying to get out of quicksand while wearing a burlap sack. My own wings only added to my troubles in finding balance and keeping my footing.

  Fingers clamped down over my wrist, and I screamed.

  “Easy,” Caleb said, trying to pull me out of the liquid stone from where he stood safely on solid roof a foot or so away. “I don’t want to get pulled into that.”

  “I’m covered in it,” I said, barely moving. “Did you have to make so big a pool of it?”

  “We only had one shot to catch Stanis,” he said. He rocked himself back farther, and I started to move. “I didn’t want to miss our opportunity, even if it meant depleting our remaining Kimiya.”

  I stopped and looked up at him, wiping the liquid stone away from my eyes. “We’re out of it now?” I asked.

  “Almost,” he said. “I saved just enough to complete the rest of our plan, but essentially, yeah.”

  “Shit,” I said, standing still knee deep in the liquid stone.

  “You okay?”

  “All things considered?” I said, doing a quick physical inventory, taking stock of the aches and pains of my body in all this. I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Good,” he said, and started pulling me out once again.

  Slowly, I came free, the liquid stone running from my body and my damaged wings back into the pool below. I couldn’t help but notice some of it was the color of my blood. My own set of wings, still partially intact, drooped against me as I concentrated on my footing. When I was finally out of the pool, I let go of Caleb’s hand and turned to assess the situation.