The sudden opening of his wings struck terror in me, but this was what I had wanted—him away from Stanis.
Caleb’s hand went into his coat and from within he pulled a clear vial filled with purple liquid. He unstoppered it and let a single drop fall to the ground on the spot Marshall had sprayed on his way over to us. I only hoped he and Rory had covered as much of the ship as they could have with the amount of Kimiya we had made. The rest relied on Caleb’s transformative mixture.
My mind and arcane will were already reaching out, searching for the one thing I needed to isolate in this freighter and finding it—my arcane connection to stone . . . and it grew every passing second as the steel of the ship began to transform all along the path of Marshall and Rory’s trails. I breathed out my words of power, the rest of my will and energy bridging the newfound connection.
Kejetan was in a full-on run toward me by then, and the deep part of my primal brain wanted to flee, but I stood my ground, focusing on the gargoyle’s feet as they hit the floor of the ship. As his right claw came down, I rushed my will into the spot below it, what had become a stone floor itself rising up around his foot, twisting over it, encasing it.
Kejetan stumbled, and when his other foot came down, I caught that one in another swirl of malleable floor, hardening them both in place.
The momentum of his charge sent him tumbling forward, but Kejetan caught himself with his wings to remain standing. Immediately, he used their clawed tips to free himself from where his feet were trapped, but it did him no good.
Caleb laughed. “Now, you see, maybe if you worked smarter and not just meaner, you might have stood a chance.”
Kejetan looked down at his feet, then caught my eye, confusion in his voice now.
“How?” he asked. “How are you using the steel of my ship to do this? Your bloodline’s arcane skill is only with stone!”
“Technically,” I said, “I am working with stone here.”
“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.