by Anton Strout
“We’re getting down this way,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s the way we’re coming back up.”
Marshall’s voice screamed at the back of my mind reminding me on the importance of rope. Sadly, I had none.
“Normally I’d say ladies before gentlemen,” Caleb said, lowering himself in to his waist, his hands spread out on the floor to either side of him. “But somehow I don’t think letting you plummet into trouble first would be chivalrous.”
Before I could respond, he pulled his arms in tight and dropped through, landing on his feet with a hushed thud. He waved for me to jump down, and before I could start worrying about breaking an ankle or hitting my head on a rock, I sat on the floor, scootched forward, and let go.
I needn’t have worried about damaging myself on the floor below. Caleb caught me in his arms, lowering me to the ground.
“Thanks,” I said, welcoming the closeness.
“That’s two chivalry points,” he said with a smile.
The walls and ceiling there were nothing like those on the main floor. No ornamentation or detailing beyond the plain, carved stones fit together and the vaulted arches supporting the structure. Not that there was much to see in the narrow corridor we found ourselves in. The entire lighting consisted of bare bulbs that had been pegged into the stone walls too far apart to actually give off much light.
“Come on,” Caleb said, turning right down the corridor.
The space echoed with our movement as we walked through arch after arch, coming to a final one barred by a thick iron gate that ran from floor to ceiling. Beyond it, in the shadows, lay the outlines of what looked like shelves similar to those in the gated area upstairs.
“Now, see, this says restricted area,” Caleb said in a triumphant whisper as he pressed his face up against the gate, looking through. “Don’t you think?”
“I particularly like the bars,” I said. “Nice touch.”
Caleb stepped back and wrapped his hands around the gate, pulling then pushing them, but they didn’t move.
“So how do we get in?” I asked.
Caleb took my light from me and set to examining the gate and the arch.
“Maybe you need a secret decoder ring from the Pope,” he said. “I don’t know. All I do know is that we need to find a way in.” He continued his investigation, his face inches from the wall where the arch met the gate. “Oh great.”
“What is it?” I asked, straining to notice what he might be looking at but failing to see jack.
“Mr. Locke might not let your average Joe down here, and it seems he’s had some extra precautions installed.”
“Like . . . ?” I moved closer, watching Caleb as his fingers traced along the surface of the stone wall.
“I’m not sure, exactly,” he said. He reached out and took my hand in his. If I weren’t already panicked about being discovered, I might have taken a moment to enjoy it, but the desire passed as Caleb raised my hand and pressed it to the stone. He placed his hand over mine and guided my fingers along the stones of the archway.
“Feel that?” he asked.
I nodded, pulling my hand away and focusing on the spot as my eyes finally tuned in to what I hadn’t seen at first.
“It looks like a language,” I said.
“Runes,” he corrected. “More specifically: runes of warding. Meant to keep us out.”
Both my eyebrows raised. “Did Locke do this?”
Caleb snickered. “These religious types don’t like to dirty their hands dabbling in magic,” he said. “Too above it all, but you know what they’re not above? Hiring freelancers to do their dirty work. I’m just a little hurt he didn’t ask me.”
“Do you know how it’s meant to keep us out?”
“Not exactly,” he said, “but by the style of the carving, I can pin who did it. The Witch and Bitch Society. You know, like the Stitch and Bitch knitters.”
“O . . . kay.”
Caleb let out a long sigh. “I wish I could say it was just a clever take on a sewing circle name, but I’ve had a run-in or two with them. Not all that fond of their work, mostly because they cut into my profit margin in competitive freelancing.”
“But can you break this ward?” I asked. “Can you get us in?”
“Maybe,” he said, and started poking through the contents of his jacket.
Nerves getting the better of me, I couldn’t stand waiting, and as a thought occurred to me, I pressed past Caleb toward the gate. I grabbed the latch, which he had completely ignored, feeling resistance, but more of the kind that came with aged metal. I jerked the latch upward, and the gate swung freely into the room beyond.
“Look at me,” I whisper shouted. “I’m a wizard!”
“Or we could try that approach, sure.”
Triumphant but still full of nerves, I pressed on into the room beyond. Much like the gated area above, rows of shelves filled the room, a large maze of books and artifacts stacked high on each of them. Row after row continued down the line, and at the end against the back wall lay a small, carved basin set half in the floor and half into the wall.
“A well?” Caleb asked.
“It’s a stoup,” I said. “It’s a Roman Catholic architectural thing. The more ornate ones are set at the front of the church by the doors, but I’m thinking the Libra Concordia is keeping a ready supply in case they have to deal with any of the nasty toys they might have gathered here.”
“Is it holy water?” Caleb asked, stepping back from it.
“Afraid you might get burned?” I asked.
Caleb ignored me and set off down one of the aisles. I picked another and headed into it. If my great-great-grandfather’s secrets were somewhere in the church as the notes had said, this had to be the place.
There was little hope in determining the point and purpose of much that was here, not without some kind of reference material, but I slogged on through the aisles for half an hour or so before something on the shelves caught my eye.
“Caleb!” I called out to the next aisle as quietly as I could, and he came running.
“Find something?” he asked.
I raised my light, shining it on the small, sculpted building that sat on the shelf.
Caleb reached for it, pulling it from under several books that were leaning against it.
“This is where we are,” he said. “It’s a scale model of this very church.”
“This isn’t a scale model of this church,” I said, taking it from him.
Caleb eyed me with suspicion. “It looks like one to me,” he said.
“It’s a puzzle box,” I corrected. “One of my great-great-grandfather’s, to be precise. What it is doing here apart from the rest we kept at the Belarus Building is a mystery.”
“Maybe Desmond Locke took it,” he said.
“I’ve never seen it before. It must have gone missing from the collection before I was born.”
“It’s pretty elaborate,” Caleb said, still staring at the miniature in wonder.
I looked up at him, a little perturbed. “All Alexander Belarus knew how to make were elaborate things. You’ve met Stanis, right?”
“I’m just saying,” he said. “As far as nonmagical things go, if that’s a puzzle box, it’s also an amazing miniature architectural wonder.”
I ignored him, continuing to look it over. By its heft alone, I could judge that the miniature of the church was itself actually comprised of stone. I doubted that simply trying to smash it on the ground was going to make it divulge its secrets to us.
“We had lots of these in his art studio,” I said. “Nothing quite like this, mind you, but I had worked my way through all those puzzles over time, so hopefully this one won’t take me too long to figure out.”
As I set to examining the miniature church closer, Caleb moved past me back out into the main aisle, looking around.
“The sooner, the better,” he said. “Not sure how long we have before someone discovers we’re down here.”
/> “Puzzling as fast as I can,” I said, and turned the church over and over in my hands.
Alexander might have been a Spellmason, but the core of that practice was his artistry and, in this specific case, his flair for architecture. The real trick of his work was in knowing what to look for. My great-great-grandfather was a logical man, and if you paid attention to the things he had created—arcane or not—there was a sense to them. With that in mind, I set the church back down on the shelf to ponder its mysteries.
I tapped at it on all sides, hoping to hear a hollow part, but the damned thing seemed as solid a piece of stone as it looked.
“Damn Alexander and his old-world craftsmanship,” Caleb said, shaking his fist at the miniature church.
Think, Lexi, think!
“Craftsmanship . . .” I repeated, the word striking a chord in me. “Whether in miniature or not, the principles of architecture should hold true.”
“Principles of architecture?”
“Things such as the classical-ideals stuff that sprung out of the Roman Empire, like the arch.” I pointed at the one over the door of the tiny church. “What’s the most foundational item in supporting a structure like this church? If you wanted to build something tall out of stone, it had to be sturdy.” I spun the model around and pointed to another arch. “Tensile stress of open space is taken up by compressional stress.”
“Compressional?”
I spun the model again, pointing to another arch, dragging my finger to the top of it, pointing at the stone there.
“Keystones,” I said, turning the church back to its front face.
I ran my thumb over the keystone above the main doors of the church and it felt solid to my touch, but when I pressed hard against it, the tiny keystone slid inward with a click. I rotated the church, moving from arch to arch, activating all the rest of the keystones I could find. The last two were along the top of the steeple, and once pressed, the base of the model came free, sliding out and away from under it.
“Got it?” Caleb asked.
“Maybe,” I said, examining it. I pried the top of the base open from a notch at its center, finding what I was looking for, the familiar scrolled Belarus B etched into the cover of the book.
Caleb reached past me and grabbed the book from within the base, struggling to lift it in one hand. “Heavy,” he said. “It’s stone.”
“To keep it safe from the ravages of time,” I said, grabbing it back from him. “Like my great-great-grandfather’s master spell book. I can take care of that later.”
“We should go,” he said.
I agreed, fixing the by-then-empty base back under the church until I felt it lock into place. I slid it back on the shelf, leaning the books against it as best I remembered them, hoping I was leaving it the way we had found it.
Caleb grabbed my hand and pulled me down the aisle after him, gaining speed. Now that we had had the luck of finding what we had come for, neither of us wanted to press it further by staying a moment longer than we had to. Halfway up the main aisle, the gates ahead slammed shut of their own accord. I ran to them, pulling once more at the iron handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Is there a password to this?” I asked.
“Probably,” Caleb said, looking around. “Damned if I know it, though.”
“Do something!” I shouted. I shook the gate, the rattling of it echoing through the basement of the church. I didn’t care about the noise it made now, but only because another sound caught my ear—the burbling of water behind us. I turned and looked back past Caleb in time to see the stoup along the back wall erupt in an explosion of water.
Caleb spun around. “Oh hell,” he said. “I really hate those Witch and Bitch hags.”
What I thought must be a geyser bubbled up out of the stoup all the way to the ceiling before I realized it was something more than just that. An actual form took shape within it, resembling something that reminded me of one of those Chinese parade dragons. “What is that?”
“Not sure,” Caleb said, grabbing my arm as the creature charged us. He pulled me away from the gate after him as he darted down one of the other aisles. “Let’s not find out, shall we?”
I agreed wholeheartedly, running after him just as the creature hit the iron gate. It slowed as it passed through it, the solidity of its body working its way around the bars, but its head was already rearing around to come back through for a return trip. Caleb jerked my arm as he turned down a side aisle, and the creature fell out of my line of sight.
“We need another way out,” he said, coming to a stop. I slammed into him, turning to find ourselves at the back wall once more, with the broken stoup in front of us. The creature’s telltale sloshing noise, coming from somewhere behind us, grew louder with each passing second.
Was I supposed to fight the damn thing? How the hell did you fight water?
And I didn’t dare defend myself in the bowels of this unfamiliar church by rearranging any parts of the walls or ceiling to protect us. We were in the basement now—most of the architectural structures around us were probably crucial to keeping the building standing. The last thing I wanted to do was magic the wrong stone out of place and pull the entire building down on top of us.
The floor near the stoup, however, was another story. If there was water coming in, there was also a source for it, one that might be a way out. A mass of pipes leading away from the stoup drilled down into the floor, and I set my will against several floor slabs that lay just in front of them.
I breathed out the words of power once more, the weight of the ancient stones straining my will as I forced them up and out of the floor where they had sat joined for centuries. I rolled the bunch of them off to the side as I pushed my will into the stones beneath those, feeling the shift and grind of the ground beneath us as I did so. Dust and dirt fell away from the stones as they came fully free, and I tore them up out of the earth, feeling a bit of hope when a waft of air rose up out of the open hole.
“Get in,” I said, peering down into the darkness below. Light danced along a hint of water below, but the noxious smell of trash and something more foul arose, driving Caleb back as he approached.
“Is that . . . ?”
“Don’t argue,” I shouted. “Just get in!”
Caleb still looked hesitant, but the sound of the water creature was closer than ever. I didn’t bother to turn around, opting instead for shoving Caleb down into the hole before jumping in after him.
Once through, the light was not nearly as bad as I thought, allowing me to see Caleb crumple into the stream of sewage below us right before I landed on him. My boots caught him in the middle of his back, driving him fully underwater, which on the plus side allowed me to keep standing. I stepped off him onto the floor of the tunnel and stumbled away as Caleb resurfaced.
His hair was matted to his head, and he gasped for breath, using all of his energy to stand as quickly as he could, but even so, he was drenched in sewage. He looked ill, his eyes wide, and his mouth fighting not to gag.
“Are you kidding me?” he shouted. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m sorry!” I shouted back. “What did you want me to do?”
“Not dump me into a river of sewage, for starters—”
Caleb didn’t get to finish his sentence.
The water creature poured down through the hole above us like a concentrated tidal wave. It splashed beneath the surface of the murky water and disappeared, the only movement that of the running sewage.
“I don’t know about you,” Caleb said, “but I don’t plan on drowning in a river of shit. You might want to get your spell book out.”
Caleb didn’t have to ask twice; my hands were already fumbling for my notebook as the stream of sewage erupted with the splash of the rising, swirling creature. The clear form of its body was now a dark and chunky mix, which I didn’t care to think about, but I’d be damned if I’d let that thing get ahold of me, especially in that form. The real question was what was
I supposed to do?
“A little help here,” I called out while looking for anything helpful in my notes. “Liquid really isn’t my forte.”
The creature lunged for Caleb, and rather than trying to avoid it, he pushed forward, lunging through it. There was resistance in its body, but Caleb came through the other side of it wet but otherwise unharmed. The same could not be said of the creature, which fell into two pieces. As the two pieces of the monster fought to rejoin themselves, Caleb held up a vial filled with something gray.
“Liquid isn’t really your forte?” he asked, repeating me while upending the vial, the powdery concoction pouring out of it into the creature. “Unless it’s liquid stone.”
The color of its form shifted from its addition, and when I reached out with my power, I felt it connect to the writhing creature in front of me. The monster lunged, but I could feel the presence of stone growing within it as the gray of its form grew darker and darker. My will lashed out, and what had become a stone creature fell to my command, and I slowed it, and to my surprise, the mass solidified, crashing into the bottom of the tunnel. It shattered into several sections as it settled there, the twisted, tortured features of its solid face sticking up out of the sewage at me.
Caleb held up the emptied vial, tapping the last few flakes out of it.
“What was that?” I asked, unable to suppress a shiver.
“Mostly just concrete,” he said.
I looked at the broken length of the twisted creature. “That vial didn’t hold that much concrete.”
Caleb slipped the empty vial inside his coat and shook his head in disappointment at me. When he spoke, there was anger in his words. “See? It’s just that kind of linear, literal thinking just like upstairs with the stone that is holding you back,” he said. “Sure, I get it. You carve things. They’re finite, tangible . . . but alchemy isn’t about size or proportion all the time. You see a single vial of concrete. You know what I see as an alchemist? A bit of concrete mixed with some quick-spreading Kimiya that accelerates growth.” He shook his head, then slapped me on the shoulder as he walked past me. “You need to get that kind of thinking out of your head.”
