I fell in line.
The quality of the blows changed, the stone of them quickly losing their weight, until the softness of flesh returned to them. The man stopped and stood up, wiping them against his pant legs. I remained lying where I was.
“Good gargoyle,” he said.
“Grotesque,” I replied with what hint of mental fight there was left in me. “My maker called me his grotesque.”
“I’m sure he did,” the man said, stepping back. Devon and my father joined him, the three of them staring down at me. “You see? I still have my uses. You shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss me. And you really need to control your temper.”
My father looked to him. “Like now,” he said with a restrained tone.
“Exactly,” the man said, turning away from him to concentrate on the supplies still on his table. “And as a reminder, I may be expensive, but you do get what you pay for.”
“I paid to have our arcane secrets extracted from him,” my father said.
“We can worry about the details of the old contract later,” the man said. “You’ve gotten some very useful information out of this golem, I think. And thanks to my bringing him under control, you’ve got a great tool at your disposal to help you get the information back that you wanted, right?”
“So what now?” Devon asked.
Kejetan moved to stand over my prone, exhausted form. “Now?” he asked. “Now we take what is ours from the Belarus Building. That is not a problem, is it, Stanis?”
I thought about it. Other than the barely intelligible whisper of my true voice at the back of my mind, my dominant mind saw no reason to resist.
“As you wish,” I said.
Seven
Alexandra
Despite all the time I spent trying to decipher the finer points of Spellmasonry, peace and quiet had reigned on the home front until last night. So it was with an angry and fearful heart the next morning that I set upon the dark and personal task of attempting my own arcane warding of the entrance to the guild hall.
If Alexander Belarus had protected the Belarus Building for several hundred years with the power of his wards, surely I could do a single room.
Or so I thought.
The alchemy of how to construct the safety measure was where I had the problem. If I already had prowess in any of this, I’m sure it would be as easy as following a recipe. Most recipes, however, didn’t require you to imbue carved-stone markers with the power to grant or deny entrance to a space.
How the hell was I supposed to do that? I couldn’t rightly “teach” stone how to read minds to determine intent or make judgment calls about anyone who tried to enter. And after several hours of tinkering, I settled instead on something that seemed an easier solution—enchanting the stone to activate and open by the invocation of simply speaking a password to allow safe entrance.
My stomach growled as I sat there satisfied with my work, and I set off upstairs in search of food, grabbing a quick sandwich before heading back down to the basement.
I nearly dropped my plate and soda when I saw a figure standing at the slid-back bookcase that hid the stone door, but, thankfully, it was only Rory, who was putting her key to the building back into her enormous dance bag.
She turned at the sound of my plate knocking against my water bottle, catching the surprise on my face.
“Sorry,” Rory said. “I let myself in.” She pushed against the stone door. “It’s locked.”
“After last night, I decided I needed to try my hand at upping security.”
Rory looked around, her eyes looking low to the floor. She pulled a long, tall water bottle from her dance bag and brandished it like a club. “Am I about to be ambushed by an army of Bricksleys?”
“No,” I said. “He’s actually inside there. I left him putting away a bunch of the alchemy supplies I was mixing. Our supply of Kimiya is running lower than ever down here, thanks to our thief. There’s more up at the Belarus Building, so I’ll probably head up later to grab it, but even that’s dwindling. If we don’t figure out how to make it soon, I may have to back off our experiments.”
Rory relaxed and turned back to the door. “Can you magic it open for us?”
I held up my sandwich and water bottle. “Sorry. Hands full here. You try.”
She looked at me like I had two heads. “Be serious.”
“I am being serious,” I said. “You don’t have to be all fancy magic pants to do it. It’s like my laptop: password-protected. At least, I think it is. You’re my first guinea pig.”
Rory seemed wary, then glanced back at the door, striking a pose like a wizard readying for battle. “So what’s the password?”
“I’ll give you three guesses.”
Rory thought for a moment, then, in her best Hermione Granger voice, said, “Wingardium Leviosa!”
Nothing happened. Rory looked to me, but I only shrugged at her.
She paced back and forth for a moment, then said, “A hint, please.”
“Well,” I said, thinking, “it has to be something all three of us could use, so consider Marshall in this, too.”
Her eyes went wide, and she spun toward the door, shouting, “Friendship is magic!”
Again, nothing happened. Rory sighed.
“It’s something Marshall always calls us,” I offered. “Think Lord of the Rings.”
The disappointment swept away from Rory’s face as she did her best Gandalf—which wasn’t very good at all. “Mellon.”
The door clicked and opened into the room.
“Clever,” Rory said, going in. “Now we just have to make sure we’re not attacked by anyone speaking Elvish.”
I shook my head as I marched to the table at the center of the room where I had been working. Bricksley had made short work of the mess I had left there, and I put my food down on the recently cleared space, attacking my sandwich.
I was three bites in before something hit me, and I pulled out my phone, checking the time.
“You’re early,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of hours.”
“Well, my dance card literally opened up for the day,” Rory said. “One of the things that the Manhattan Conservatory of Dance frowns on is dizziness and vomiting in class.”
“Rory!” I said, my mouth full of food, almost choking as I said her name. I swallowed. “You okay?”
She nodded, taking a long sip from her bottle of water.
“I will be,” she said. “I guess I was a little more concussed than I thought. Our morning study was all textbook, history and such, which left me with a headache, but our late-morning session was practical. I got into maybe my tenth or eleventh fouette before I fell over and threw up.” She laid her dance bag by the table and sat down across from me, grabbing up one of the books she had been going through yesterday. “I’ll try not to blow buckets of bile on any of your books.”
“No,” I said, taking the book from her. “No researching for you. Absolutely not.”
Rory reached for the book but missed by a mile.
“I’m not going to vomit,” she said, looking a little paler than I liked to see her. “Probably not, anyway.”
I shook my head. “Rory, you must have hit your head last night harder than we thought,” I said. “You need to see the doctor.”
Rory leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest. “That’s where I spent the rest of my afternoon,” she said, but nothing more.
“And . . . ?”
She sighed, running her fingers through her Cookie Monster blue hair. “She yelled at me for not coming in sooner,” she said. “But not just because of the concussion. Under these clothes, my body is a rainbow of colors, going a bit heavy on the black-and-blue side.”