Free Stonecast by Anton Strout

blows of his flesh hands felt just as heavy as those of my father or Devon. I fought to buck him off me, but it was no use.
    “Fall in line!” he shouted with each shot he took at me.
    With each passing blow, more and more of the fight went out of me until there was nothing left to do but take the abuse. My true voice subsided until I had no desire left in me.
    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
    D espite 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