“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said, impressed. “I’ve spent most of my time just trying to wrap my mind around my family’s legacy, which to you is just a small piece of a grander puzzle, isn’t it?”
Caleb nodded.
“Before I knew about the Libra Concordia,” he said, “I studied up on what I could find out about your great-great-grandfather, his work back in the old country.
“Several centuries ago, the world was a much bigger place, and it was easier to be hidden away in it. Scattered towns and villages, kingdoms that only talked to each other at wartime. And arcana was hidden then because religious zealotry would have condemned it. But reputations could be earned over time, especially if those arcane powers were put to good use for the sake of a village and its safety. Alexander Belarus was such a figure, and, yes, it did indeed earn him a reputation.”
“Sadly, it also earned him the attention of a local lord mad for power,” I said. “Kejetan the Accursed.”
“Did it, now?” Caleb asked, a surprised smile on his face. “I hadn’t read of that actual name.”
I nodded.
“And Accursed?” he continued, his smile widening. He gave a pleasant laugh. “I mean, with a title like that, I guess you have to go into the mad lord business, right?”
“Don’t be so flip,” I said, anger suddenly rising in me. “Enslaving my great-great-grandfather ended up costing the lord his only son. Stanis is all that remains of him, and he is not cut from the same cloth as his father, believe me.” I calmed myself for a moment before pointing to his hands. “Maybe we should get back to work.”
“Oh, right,” he said, and went back to the vials in his hands, mixing a drop here to a drop there, and every so often holding it up to the light once again to check its color.
Marshall had reorganized since last I had been here. When I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I searched around the rest of the back room, checking shelf after shelf of painted miniature figures. Most looked to be about an inch or two high, either plastic or metal, but along one section of wall I finally found several of the troll-like creatures I had spied a while back that seemed to actually be carved from stone. I pulled one down.
“Only at a hard-core game store can you find everything for your wizarding and witching ways,” I said.
Caleb resealed all but one of the vials before returning the rest to their slots inside his coat on the chair. He pulled another vial from the bandolier there, holding it out in front of me.
“Recognize it?” he asked.
Seeing the dark red liquid swirling around in the clear plastic tube, I raised my eyebrows and gave a tight-lipped smile. “Of course I do,” I said. “I should, anyway. It probably came from my family’s private stock.”
“Kimiya,” he said. “But no, you are incorrect. This isn’t stolen. This is my attempt at the reverse-engineered home brew.” He held up the other mixture. “And this—this is a bit of a transformative binding solution. Not all that much by itself, but . . .”
He pulled the stopper from the Kimiya, tipped it to the other vial, and let a single drop from it fall into the other. Caleb stoppered it back up, slipped it into his coat, then swirled the new mixture in the remaining vial. He held his hand out to me, and I passed the stone troll over to him.
Caleb laid the tiny stone monster on the empty chair his coat hung over and poured the concoction over the figure until it was saturated, the ritual beginning to look a bit like what I had gone through in creating Bricksley.
“I believe I know this part,” I said, picking up the figure and lowering it into the maze spread out on Marshall’s gaming table.
I raised my hand and stared down my arm at the wet figure standing there among the walls of what looked to be a fairly realistic miniature dungeon. I had no idea if sighting the figure between the pointer and pinky finger of my raised hand actually helped, but at the very least it gave me a focal point as I reached out with my will for control of the figure.
The connection snapped to—like holding the object in an invisible version of my hand—and I tried to will it to move through the maze on the table.
The tiny figure shot forward, slamming into the dungeon walls, knocking them so hard that one section fell from the table, and another flew into the air across the room before hitting the wall. The alchemical mix threw great power into even the simplest of my actions, the figure responding to the smallest amount of pressure I put on it, making it hard to use finesse in managing my control over it.
I forced the troll to stop near one of the metal figures in the maze, a short, bearded character with a stocky build carrying what looked like a giant hammer. A dwarf. I had to see if I could brew a little combat there.
My creature lifted its arms high over its head to smash the other one, and I brought them down on it. Rather than simply knocking the bearded figure over, my troll crushed the metal of it down into the faux stone floor of the maze, but the force of my will didn’t end there. The sharp crack of wood came from beneath the dungeon. The coffee table split in two, the figures and stone maze collapsing in on themselves as its contents slid to the floor at the center of the break.
“Shit,” I said, losing total control of the little figure, and it rampaged off through the rubble, crashing and smashing its way through the pile.
“I got this,” Caleb said, sliding another vial from the coat. He dropped to his knees and held it over the still-swinging troll before pouring the contents onto it, then drank from the vial himself. His face drew up in concentration as he extended his hand out in front of the tiny stone troll. It continued on along its violent path, but it slowed as the stone of it seized up, toppling over inert into his palm.
Caleb got up off his knees, his eyes staying on the figure, and presented it to me.
I marveled at it. “You’ve got control of it now?”
“For the moment,” he said.
I reached for the figure, but before I could take it from Caleb, its form began to shake and twist in his hand. It exploded as I was pulling my hand back from it, bits of stone shooting against my knuckles, but thankfully not breaking the skin.
Caleb clutched his hand with his other one.
“You said you had control of it!” I said, prying his fingers open to look at the damage. Luckily, Caleb had pulled away in time, and his hand remained in one piece.
“Controlling things are a bit more of a Spellmason thing than alchemy,” he said.
I looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
Caleb pulled his hands away, dusting them off against each other. “With alchemy, I can affect the world by transforming things on an arcane level,” he said, “but they’re all momentary modifications.”
“Like when you were turned to stone in my great-great-grandfather’s guild hall,” I offered.
“Exactly,” he said. “Or I can transform other materials, but it’s nothing more than chemicals, magic, and science. And much of it isn’t permanent. I don’t make or control things. But from what little I’ve been able to read from the notes the Libra Concordia have found from Alexander, I have been able to try my hand at what you’d probably call a rough version of Spellmasonry.”
“That’s still pretty impressive,” I said. “I mean, given my resources and an entire library of books, the only stable creature I’ve been able to make is a glorified brick. You’re a natural.”
Caleb shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I have a real handle on mixing and alchemy, but this? I don’t have the finesse for it. It’s like the stone is constantly fighting me with a will of its own.”