Page 24 of Alchemised

The upholstery of the chair was slick. Helena slid back, and it thunked onto four legs as Ferron walked in.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

“Are you always watching me?” she finally asked, still staring at the corner. The eye was so cleverly concealed that she could scarcely make it out. How many did he have in the house? It couldn’t be the only one if the speed at which the necrothralls found her was anything to go by.

He scoffed. “Hardly. You’re terribly boring.”

She should be horrified. She would be—but it would have to happen later. In the moment, all she felt was curiosity. She looked at him. He had a book on poisonous plants in hand, index finger marking his page.

“How does that work? I didn’t know you could—reanimate parts.”

“It’s actually easier than thralls,” he said, coming to stand beside her.

“Reanimation is like electricity. Just channelling the right kind of energy to where it needs to go and keeping it there. It takes barely any thing to maintain something so small once it’s encased in the proper preservatives. ”

That was less interesting than she’d hoped. She turned to watch the maids, who were finishing with the room.

They were remarkably reanimated. A person might not notice they were dead. They were agile and precise in their tasks and without any signs of decomposition. It was undeniable that Ferron had a horrific talent for necromancy.

It had to take a tremendous amount of mental resources to maintain and independently monitor them to behave like that. There was a reason necrothralls were mostly used for repetitive labour and battle hordes: Complex tasks were beyond their limited mental capacity.

How was that possible?

She looked at Ferron, scrutinising him.

“You’re not a homunculus, are you?” She felt ridiculous asking the question. Artificial humans were considered as mythical as chimaeras or philosopher stones. One of the many ideas attributed to Cetus in the prescientific era.

Of the three, homunculi were a particularly enduring concept.

The idea was that by placing a man’s seed in a cucurbit with the proper environment of stable warmth, it could come to life on its own.

After being fed distilled blood, it could grow into a human of limitless alchemical potential and utterly without flaws because it was unspoiled by the inferior environment and contributions of a female womb—the source of all humanity’s flaws.

Ferron stared. “Pardon?”

“Never mind,” she said quickly. Obviously, he wasn’t; she’d known him as an ordinary boy, and a “flawless” human would not be a mass murderer. “I’m just trying to figure you out.”

He laughed. “I suppose I should be flattered that that’s what you came up with, but no, I’m not a homunculus.” There was a pause. “Although Bennet did spend years trying to grow one. All he ended up with was a lot of cucurbits of putrefied sperm.”

She grimaced but eyed him again.

There was undeniably something done to Ferron. With Morrough in his monstrous and distorted form, it made sense that he’d have unnatural abilities as a result of whatever transmutations he’d performed on himself, but Ferron looked mostly human.

Where did the power come from? She studied him.

Supposedly there were crystals and precious stones with properties useful for resonance.

In early myths of Orion Holdfast, Sol’s blessing was described as a huge celestial stone.

Amulets featuring crystals had been long popular as a result.

Necklaces and brooches had been sold in Paladian shops and stands to visiting pilgrims who considered the city-state as particularly sacred to the Faith, often with promises that they would strengthen or expand an alchemist’s resonance or repertoire, ensuring admission to the Institute.

Many students wore heirloom jewellery, and the official figures of the Faith often wore items set with sunstones.

She studied Ferron for any jewellery or signs of an amulet.

Guild families usually wore signet rings and a variety of pins and brooches to indicate their orders and exclusive clubs, but in stark contrast with his wife and father, Ferron usually wore nothing, not even a wedding band.

The only piece visible was a slender, dark metal ring on his right hand.

Her eyes narrowed as she studied it.

“What kind of ring is that?” she asked.

He looked down. “This?” he asked, as if there were any other rings she could have been referring to. He turned his hand. “Just an old piece.”

He slipped it off and tossed it to her. She caught it reflexively, disappointed to discover that it wasn’t an unusual black metal at all, but a severely tarnished silver ring, as if he never took it off to care for it.

It was hand-forged rather than transmutationally crafted; she could see the hammer marks that had beaten a scaled, almost geometric pattern onto it.

A bizarre thing for an iron alchemist to wear.

She could feel him watching and wondered what he’d do if she swallowed it.

“Don’t swallow it.”

She looked up.

He gave her a sidelong look. “You’re lucky the national exam never tested for an ability to lie. You have a transparent face.”

He held out his hand for the ring. Helena debated popping it into her mouth solely to provoke him.

Irritation flickered in his eyes. “Try it, and I’ll bring it back up again. All you’ll get is a sore throat.”

She dropped the ring into his palm, and he slid it back onto his finger.

“Why all this sudden interest in me?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You don’t make sense.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all? And here I was hoping you were plotting to seduce me.”

She stared at him blankly.

He gave a mocking smile. “Steal my heart with your wit and charms.”

Helena scoffed.

“Who knows, perhaps I have a proclivity for—” He paused, studying her, trying to find something.

Helena walked away. “Maybe tomorrow.”

O N HER OWN, IT WAS nice, feeling like a functioning person again. Helena had forgotten how easy it was to exist when her mind and body couldn’t betray her.

She was determined not to waste the effects of the tablet and moved through the house quickly, puzzling over the drug’s composition as she went.

Her parents had practised medicine. Her mother as an apothecary, and her father as a traditional surgeon trained in Khem.

Helena had grown up surrounded by herbs and tinctures and medical procedures.

It wasn’t formal training, but it was enough that she’d been a quick study as a healer, much to the distaste of her religious superior, Falcon Matias.

She’d once tried to tell him that the principles of healing followed the same rules as any form of medicine, citing her parents’ work. It was like manual versus alchemical metallurgy: The use of resonance did not alter the fundamental principles.

He’d been so incensed, he’d made Helena spend two days in a chantry offering penance for daring to compare her corrupted resonance to that of the Noble Art.

According to Matias’s stringent understanding of the Faith, necromancy, in addition to its violation of the dead, was also a violation of the natural cycle and natural law, and vivimancy stemmed from the same corrupt form of resonance.

Healing was permitted within limits because it was categorised as a spiritual intercession, something selfless and divinely led.

Helena had never understood why, but the Institute, which generally treated science and the Faith as complementary to each other, strictly banned the study of vivimancy even for healing.

Most healers tended to appear in remote places in the Novis Mountains and were only taught to work by intuition, their success or failure left to the will of Sol. No “science” about it.

Helena learned to hold her tongue and pretend that her unusual talent for healing was divine and not because she understood the systems and functions of the human body.

The tablet Ferron had forced down her throat was a clear demonstration of the potential if healing were allowed to be scientific.

It seemed to have some kind of vasoconstriction component.

A glycoside, perhaps synthesised from foxglove.

She tried to remember if she’d noticed anything that might have indicated mineral acids, and maybe …

“Awful, aren’t they?” Aurelia’s voice floated down the hallways from the foyer. “They were inside at first, but it doesn’t matter how much they’re doused, they just reek. I told Kaine I’d set them on fire if they stayed inside another day.”

“He won’t just get you new ones?” It was a man’s voice.

“No.” Aurelia’s tone was petulant. “I’ve asked and asked, but they’re Central’s, so we must keep them. Everyone else has new thralls all the time, but Kaine never wants to change them. Then he finally brings some new ones, and they’re those awful things.”

“For the prisoner, I suppose.”

“Of course.” Aurelia’s voice turned sour.

“The whole house has been turned upside down because of her. Just look at the banisters. They make the foyer look like some giant birdcage, but Kaine insists we keep them like this now. He bites my head off if I even leave a door open, and the thralls are never around when I need them. It’s so embarrassing.

I saw Lotte Durant the other day. Her husband gets her new thralls as soon as the old ones start getting ugly.

Lets her pick them out and everything. They do whatever she tells them.

Even awful things sometimes—it’s so funny.

One of the girl ones scorched Lotte’s new silk, and you should have seen what Lotte had all the rest of them do to it.

Chills just thinking about it. I wanted to punish one of mine once, and Kaine showed up saying they’re his and if I want to torture any, I’d have to make my own … Well, I would if I could.”

Helena followed Aurelia’s voice and discovered that the foyer had been transformed since she’d last seen it. The rails had been reshaped into iron bars stretching all the way up to the ceiling, making it impossible to jump from the landings or from the stairs. Ferron was clearly taking no risks.

Down below, Aurelia and her companion walked into the next room, still discussing how unfair and unsympathetic Ferron was as a husband.

The details of the ouroboros on the foyer floor showed up better from the third floor, even with the bars. Helena stared down, studying the wings, the spines, the fangs, and the sleek body curving into a circle as it consumed itself.

T HE NEXT MORNING, H ELENA LAY pinned to her mattress as if a boulder had been dropped onto her chest. A lash of despair, and grief, and anger—all the feelings she’d been unable to experience the day before—had come back, redoubled, so heavy she could barely breathe.

The period of respite made it all hurt even more; the momentary relief making the magnitude of its weight even more tangible. She could feel herself crumbling.

Her spine and neck were overheated while the rest of her body was clammy and ice-cold, the sheets and nightclothes damp with a strong mineral scent. There’d definitely been mineral salts in the tablet.

She rolled onto her side and was violently sick on the floor.

She slumped down, shivering, limbs leaden. She wanted to strangle Ferron and then crawl into a hole and die. She was hot and cold and thirsty and pathetically desperate for comfort.

If even one of the necrothralls had walked in and stroked her hair, she probably would have wept.

A wave of loneliness struck so sharply, she gave a heaving sob and almost burst into tears anyway.

The door opened, and one of the necrothralls did enter, but only to clean the mess.

She lay in bed sick until evening, shivering and sweating until she passed out from exhaustion.

When Ferron arrived the next day, Helena glared daggers at him. He could have warned her about the withdrawal.

He waited for her to retrieve her cloak, but rather than lead the way, he stood and let her walk past.

The hallway was unlit. She could feel the shadows, the dark looming, but she kept her fingers tracing along the wainscotting and her focus on her next step. She knew her way. Even in the dark, she could find it now.

When she reached the courtyard, Ferron appeared on the veranda, observing her like a scientist with a test subject.

She sighed and began a tedious walk around the courtyard. When she finished the first loop, he was already gone.