“Stand still!” Rory called out to him, poised for action, holding her pole arm over her head, hesitant to take a swing with it. “Stanis, I’m serious!”
I lent her a hand, steadying the buckling floor directly beneath Stanis for a moment, allowing the gargoyle a bit more control of his movement. Instead of struggling, he pulled his wings in tight around him, making his body as small a target as he could.
Rory’s blade made quick work of removing the arms of the gargoyle to Stanis’s right, which freed his other arm enough that he lashed out with his claws at the remaining ones on his left. Roars of pain echoed throughout the room. But, in the end, Stanis was free.
Instead of coming to us, he turned, stepping toward his father.
“I do not know what you truly hoped,” he said to Kejetan. “We stopped being family centuries ago when you killed Alexander’s son and forced him into your servitude and when you ended my own life. I was willing to be taken into servitude by you as well, to protect them and to buy them time, hoping I could dissuade you from your madness, but the truth is that a man such as you will never be satisfied. You would try to bend this modern world to your will, never giving up on obtaining the knowledge you do not justly deserve to have.”
“We could have lived as gods to them,” Kejetan said.
“And that is your true failing,” Stanis said. “We are still human born. No better than they. What you consider your calling, I consider madness.”
“Stanis,” I called out, feeling the use of my will beginning to take its toll as it drained me. “We need to go. Like, now.”
More and more of the ship was crushing in behind them, and it was taking every last part of me to keep it from adding Stanis to it all.
“Kill me, then,” Kejetan said, turning to me.
“No,” I shouted. “Back away, Stanis.” At my word, the gargoyle stepped away from Kejetan and toward me, his eyes still fixed on his father. When Stanis stood by my side, I spoke again. “I will not give you the dignity of death. Truthfully, I’m not sure if I could kill you. I might simply destroy this form you sought so hard to get all these centuries, but what of your spirit? Would it find another vessel?”
There was nothing but pure disgust on Kejetan’s face now. “Your lack of commitment will leave you undone,” he said.
“For generations, my family has either been hunted or suffered by your hand,” I said. I pressed my will into the steel-stone at his feet, crumpling the floor up over the lower half of his body, encasing him further. “And now, for generations it will be yours to suffer instead. You finally have the physical form you desire, but it will do you nothing.” I turned to Stanis. “You don’t technically breathe, correct?”
“This is true,” he said. “I do not.”
“Good.” I stepped toward Kejetan, still keeping well out of the reach of his wings, which were already partially trapped beneath the metal of the collapsing room.
“Do you have any idea how cold and dark it is at the bottom of the ocean?” I asked, watching his eyes widen but not waiting for an actual answer. “No sound, no one to rule . . . losing all freedom of movement, the ability to fly. No control, whatsoever.”
“No!” he shouted, his usual air of authority finally replaced with open fear.
“You’ve had more than a lifetime to choose your course,” I said. “The only ‘good’ to come from you was Stanis. Now you’ll have a lifetime to contemplate those choices. At the bottom of the sea.”
I expected rage. I expected pleading, screaming. I did not expect silence, which almost caused me to lose my angered emotional hold on my spell. Faltering for a second, I let the thoughts of what Kejetan might have wrought on this world fuel me. The corpses of my friends, the shattered remains of Stanis, and yes, even Caleb’s lying dead at my feet. All those images filled my mind’s eye, sticking my conviction to the spell.
“Lexi!” Rory called out from the doorway behind us. “Out, now or never!”
“Go,” I whispered to Stanis through gritted teeth.
“Farewell, Kejetan the Accursed,” he said to the man who had once been his father. Without another word, he turned and walked past me to Rory.
With the room clear of my friends, I backed my way out of it, rolling my will over it, trapping Kejetan and his fellow gargoyles in twists of crumpled steel-stone. I focused all my will to compress it in as tight as I could. Soon, the sight of anyone in the room was lost to me, but I kept compressing bit after bit of steel in on itself. My legs shook with the effort, the press of my nails digging into my palms, my body on the edge of collapse.
As I passed through the doorway of the throne room out into the rest of the ship, stone arms scooped me up into a carry.
“I have you,” Stanis said. “Do what you must.”
The five of us backed through the rest of the freighter while I continued collapsing everything that was in our wake.
Rory and Caleb took on any stragglers we came across, although at this point the bulk of those belowdecks still seemed to be of the human-servant variety, the newborn gargoyles having had at least the smarts to leave a sinking ship.
The freighter continued to collapse, and I fought to block out thoughts of the enormity of the task, as Caleb had so often instructed me.
And he had been right, too, about how a little of his alchemical mixes went a long way. I had been worried we hadn’t mixed enough Kimiya to affect the whole of the ship, but every time I thought the connection to the balled-up steel-stone would give out, I felt more of it come to life as the alchemical process continued to spread, like a virus, throughout the entire ship. I folded deck after deck in on itself as we worked ourselves higher and higher through the freighter, until we emerged on the ship’s already tilting top deck.
“Holy crapballs,” Marshall called out behind me.
“What?”
“Just . . . look.”
I turned my head. The deck of the ship was pure chaos. Human Servants of Ruthenia scrambled around, looking for some way off the ship. There were even a few gargoyles left, some not knowing what to do while others struggled to take off from the deck. With so many humans latching on to them, however, their winged forms could not get airborne.
“The diehards stayed with their master,” I said, “but the rats are fleeing a sinking ship.”
“So what now?” Rory asked. “The deck is swarming!”
“Here,” Caleb said, handing her a flask. “Take a sip and pass it around.”
Rory looked unsure. “What is it?”
“You might remember it from the night at the guild hall when I first fought you and Alexandra,” he said. “When I sped myself up.”
It was no doubt an unpleasant memory for Rory, but she drank from the flask nonetheless and passed it to Marshall. I followed, then handed it back to Caleb, who in turn drank from it and offered it to Stanis.
He shook his head. “I do not believe such a thing would work on me,” he said.
Caleb nodded and recapped the flask.
“Run for our ship over the side,” I said. “You should be speedy enough now to avoid conflict. Stanis and I will meet you there.”
Stanis didn’t wait for an answer, and with me still in his arms, he leapt into the air, arcing high above the madness below.
My friends sped across the deck of the ship below at their accelerated rate and I watched their progress as the two of us flew.
“I can take you to the safety of land,” Stanis said.