Alchemystic (30 page)

“Up! Now!” the guard said, starting over to us.

“Marsh!” Rory called out. “Get up, dumb ass.”

He lifted his eyes to meet mine. They were wide, not with panic, but excitement. He started drumming his hands on the bench to draw my attention.

Only it wasn’t a bench, I realized. “Get up,” I said, my voice calm but dead serious.
“Now.”

Marshall stood and I turned to the guard. “Sorry,” I said, quick as I could. “My friend thought it was a bench.”

The guard stopped, hesitating in his tracks, then adjusted his uniform on his walk back to his spot between rooms, but kept watching us. I grabbed Marshall by the arm and pulled him farther away from the piece, which seemed to satisfy the guard enough that he turned his attention back to watching our room and the next one over.

“What was that about?” Rory asked, coming over to us.

“Look,” Marshall said, pointing to the “bench.”

Marshall’s bench wasn’t a bench at all, but an ornately carved stone chest. Most might mistake the braid work all over it as Celtic, but I knew better. “Those patterns remind me of something very particular.”

“The carvings on Stanis’s chest,” Rory said.

“Thing is, I don’t see any stones on it,” Marshall said.

“Don’t you see?” I asked, but continued on without waiting for an answer. “It’s a puzzle box. Look at the way all those designs run through each other. They interlock. And like Alexander’s notes said, it
is
a chest where we found the ruler, so whatever we’re looking for is going to be inside it.”

“So what the hell do we do?” Rory asked.

I cracked a smile. “We open it.”

“You mean
you
open it,” Marshall said. “But what do
we
do? Let me guess…Distract the guard.”

“I can do that,” Rory said. “I can be very distracting when I want to be. How long do you need?”

I shrugged. “Not sure,” I said. “I’ve messed around with some of my great-great-grandfather’s puzzle boxes in his studio, but I suppose it really depends on how puzzling it truly is.”

“We’ll just position ourselves between you and him, hopefully blocking his view,” Rory said. “So get to it.”

I nodded, then turned to the chest, walking over to it. The guard wasn’t paying us much attention now, and I examined the chest by simply walking around it first to keep suspicion off us. I traced the knot work of the intricate carving. “It looks like an ornate tangle of snakes,” I said. “But I think I can untangle them if you can cover me while I work out the spell.” I fished the tome out of my backpack and flipped it open.

Rory and Marshall moved into position, Marshall looking like he was about to throw up. “I don’t deal well with deception,” he whispered. “I never played any of the Chaotics…not Chaotic Good, Neutral, or Evil. Definitely not Chaotic Evil.”

Rory patted him on the shoulder. “This is another one of those gamer things, isn’t it?”

Marshall nodded.

“I figured that was why I didn’t understand it,” she said, then quickly added, “Nor do I wish you to explain it to me.”

The two of them seemed content to chatter away and I dropped to my knees in front of the chest, resting the book on the tiled floor in front of me. This was different from shifting broken bricks at the building collapse site. Unraveling a puzzle chest like this was going to take finesse, not brute force, but having uncoiled the hidden one in Stanis’s chest twice now, I felt a tiny bit of hope for success.

I studied a section of Alexander’s book that looked promising, one that showed a gentler way to coerce raw stone in motion, but it meant having to touch parts of the chest, which might draw the guard’s attention. Still, Marshall and Rory were blocking his full view of me, so without another thought I slapped my hand along the front of the chest where two sections met and pressed my will into it while incanting the words from Alexander’s tome. Many of them, surprisingly enough, were becoming recognizable to me, making sense now, and I felt the meeting of the two pieces of stone give
way to my command, a low grinding sounding out from the chest.

Marshall gave me a worried look over his shoulder and shushed me, but I didn’t let it break my string of words. They were the key to getting this puzzle unraveled and I had to be fast about it. We were the only visitors in our section now, but it was only a matter of time before we either drew the guard’s attention again or other museumgoers came into this area.

The stone snakes pulsed as I unwound them from one another, small clouds of the dust of ages wafting off them.

“Hurry!” Marshall whispered, his nervous eyes darting back and forth from the guard to the chest.

I couldn’t respond or I’d break the spell, but what I really wanted was to tell him to shut the hell up. Did he think I wasn’t
trying
to hurry? I was going as fast as I could, but between the tangle puzzle and the sheer weight of the stone coils, it was like untying anchor chains. I pushed all other thoughts out of my head and focused on the elaborate puzzle box.

“Goddammit!” the guard’s voice called out from somewhere on the other side of my friends. “Didn’t I tell you to keep away from that?”

“Shit,” Marshall said. “Oh, shit.” His nervous pacing caught the corner of my eye, but I held my focus.

“Don’t worry. I told you I’d take care of this,” Rory said.

Rory started off across the room toward the guard at a brisk pace, and I couldn’t help but turn to watch her while my hands kept working on one of the inner knots of the chest. Rory hugged the wall to our right, then kicked her foot out at one of the weapon cases, shattering its front pane. She shot her arm into the case and toward the weapons rack inside, tugging at one of the pole arms within and breaking the restraint that held it in place.

The guard pulled a walkie-talkie from off his belt. “We’ve got a situation in Lives of Our Leaders,” he said. Before he could say much more Rory freed the pole arm, which, by its look from Marshall’s descriptions,
was
a glaive-guisarme, and ran at the man.

“Not the pointy end!” Marshall yelled out.

Rory swung the long hooked weapon around like she was Darth Maul, putting the spear end closer to her body than the guard’s. She swung low, sweeping behind the guard’s legs, knocking them out from under him. He flew up in the air, hanging there for a second almost cartoon-style, before his body fell back, his head hitting the tile with a solid
thunk
that could only be bone.

“Jesus Christ!” Marshall cried out.

Rory’s face was full-on worried, stepping closer to stand over the man and leaning in. A look of relief washed over her face. “We’re good,” she said, giving me a thumbs-up. “Still breathing.”

A commotion rose from farther off in the museum, the sound of others approaching.

“Make like the Flash!” Marshall called out again.

My arms were elbow deep within the darkened shadows of the chest, leaving me to work by touch alone, but I kept at it. After several moments of untangling, my fingers felt something more refined: the smooth, glassy texture of a better cut of stone. A gem—one of Stanis’s.

“Got it!” I cried out as I closed my fist over it, but as I did, something wrapped around my hand. I jerked my arm out of the chest as some sort of self-preservation kicked in. Although most of the unraveled puzzle parts lay uncoiled on the floor all around me—now an inert pile of stone—my arm came free of what remained of the chest with a carved snake mouth clamped down over my wrist. As I backed away, a long, slender body of stone emerged. At about the six-foot mark, it came free and the creature began to curl its body on the floor, its weight starting to draw me down to it.

“A little help,” I called out. I whispered some of the speaking-to-stone incantations I knew by heart now, but nothing seemed to help exert my will over it. “Belarus blood or not, this thing is not going to play nice.”

The guard groaned from where he lay on the floor, his body stirring.

“He’s waking up,” Marshall said, his nerves shot. He looked at Rory. “You couldn’t have knocked him out for longer?”

“I was pulling my punches,” she said, and started toward me.

“Why?” Marshall asked.

“He’s not
evil
, jackass,” she said. “He’s just doing his job! I’m not going to brutalize a guy for that. That doesn’t really jive with my moral compass. A girl has got to have a code to live by.”

Rory turned away from Marshall completely, picking up speed as she came for me. She tore across the floor while twirling the pole arm in her hands like she had owned one all her life. She leapt toward me on those strong, lean legs of hers and brought the blade down hard just behind the head of the snake creature. The spearhead pierced the stone, going deep before Rory twisted the blade, pulling free a thick chunk of stone it had displaced. The living piece dropped away, going inert and rolling across the floor. Cracks appeared all along the creature’s head and body as the whole thing stilled and solidified.

Rory spun her weapon around. “Oh, I need to gets me one of these,” she said.

I raised my trapped hand high overhead and brought it down on the edge of the puzzle chest’s frame as six more guards poured into the far end of the room. The snake head shattered, flaking off my still-closed fist. When I opened it, there was the stone I had come for, this one red. I looked at Marshall in triumph, but he was busy fretting over the men closing in on us.

“I can’t go to jail,” he said. “They don’t have Magic: The Gathering tournaments there!”

“I don’t intend on us getting caught,” I said. “Now, run!”

I took off without hesitating another second, getting all the way to the only other exit from the room before stopping, Marshall and Rory at my side.

“We need to go up,” I said. “We need stairs.”

Marshall nodded. “I know where they are.”

“You do?” Rory asked, impressed.

“Guess who got stuck doing all the mapping in my gaming campaigns?” he asked without really expecting an answer. “I can’t help but retain the layout of a place when I enter it now.” Marshall pulled his hat down to just over his eyes and took off to our left. Rory shot off behind him, and after I took a look back at our ever-closing pursuers, I followed. Seven of them, I counted.

Marshall led us through several rooms full of armor and then statues before he pushed open a door on his right leading to a set of stairs going up. He and Rory shot through the doorway, and several seconds later I came through it myself. The two of them were already a flight or two ahead of me, and I started up the stairs after them.

By the first landing my legs were killing me. “Wait up,” I called out to them.

Rory stopped, then Marshall. “Sorry,” she said. “We’re already good at stairs from living in a fifth-floor walk-up.”

“Where are we going?” Marshall asked, looking only a little winded.

I sprinted up to the next landing where they stood. “Up,” I huffed out. “As high as we can go.”

“Okay,” he said, and took off up the stairs once more. This time Rory stayed at my side as we went.

“This better be an awesome plan you have,” she said. “Like lure them all up here, then have the entire way down through the museum free for our escape.”

“Not quite what I had in mind,” I said. “Now, shush; I’m trying to panic here.”

“You mean
not
panic…”

I shook my head. “I wish,” I said, “but I’m going for full-blown panic here. Now, shut it.”

We went as high as we could up the stairwell, the final single set of doors opening up onto a gallery filled with animals, both stuffed and skeletal. Marshall and Rory stopped once they came onto the floor, but I didn’t and rushed right past them. “Try to keep up,” I said without looking back. I had to find what I was looking for.

Museum visitors got out of my way fast, looking at us like
we were crazy, which I really couldn’t argue with. I mean, who really ran through a museum at breakneck speed anyway?

I passed what looked like a prehistoric sloth that stood eight feet tall, then turned, finding exactly what I was looking for—a wall of windows. Seeing them brought a sense of relief, but I fought against it as I ran for them. I needed my panic. I needed to boost my signal. I skidded to a stop when I got to the window wall, spinning around.

Marshall and Rory came sliding to a stop with me. Marshall’s eyes looked around in a wild way. “It’s a dead end,” he said. “
This
was your great plan? What the hell?”

Rory looked at me with the same expression of confusion. “I’m kind of with Marshall on this,” she said, twirling the pole arm between her hands as she turned to face our pursuers.

The guards and several staff members cornered around the sloth, boxing us in.

“This is good,” I said.

Rory, who was striking a defensive posture, stood and turned to me, stamping one end of her pole arm on the ground. “Good? Good how?”

“We’re cornered, right?” I said. “And that terrifies me.”

“Being scared is good?” Marshall asked. “Oh, I’m doing better than good, then.”

“You don’t get it,” I said. “If I’m terrified, that’s like a broadcast signal. To
him
.”

Rory looked behind us out the window. “Sun’s down,” she said.

I felt a sharp twinge of familiarity in my chest and it was growing. Fast.

“Now might be a good time to duck,” I said, and threw myself off to the side of the wall of windows.

Rory dove to the other side, grabbing Marshall, who was too busy watching me get out of the way. Glass, brick, and wood exploded into the room as several hundred pounds of flying gargoyle swooped in from the early-evening sky. Chunks of wall and window frame hung from his wings as he landed, fluttering them until they were free of debris. He folded them to his side while the museum staff simply stared.

“What the
hell
is that?” one of the guards asked.

Stanis stepped toward them, glass crunching under his feet. The crowd moved as one away from him, but now the gargoyle stood between us and them.

“Don’t hurt anyone!” I shouted, stopping Stanis in his tracks. The sensation in my chest had passed now that he was here.