Page 289 of Alchemised

“I wanted her to know the ways out. I showed her the map and told her about the prison so she wouldn’t go that way,” Ivy said, her voice a whimpering sob.

“If you had listened to me, she’d be alive,” Crowther said, his voice callous. “I upheld my end of the deal; none of this is my fault.” He kicked her. “Now get out of my sight. If Lucien Holdfast had been killed in that ridiculous rescue, I would have blamed you.”

Ivy picked herself up off the floor without a word, but as she slipped through the door, she looked back for an instant, and there was murder in her eyes.

When she was gone, Crowther stepped over and pulled out a radio from inside his desk, holding the transceiver up as it crackled to life. Helena recognised the voice of the guard. One of the higher-ups.

The string of jargon that Crowther muttered was nearly incomprehensible, but Helena did pick up two phrases: “extremely dangerous” and “neutralised.”

He set the transceiver down and looked around his charred office.

“Is that really necessary?” Helena asked.

Crowther looked up. “You’ve seen what she’s capable of. Without her sister keeping her in check, Ivy is of no use. Bear in mind, that rule applies to Ferron as well.”

His eyes raked over her in disgust, as if he could see every place Kaine had touched her. “I would strongly advise keeping yourself alive, Marino.”

WHEN HELENA SAW WAGNER, HE smiled at her, but all she could think of was the terror in Sofia’s face as he shoved her towards the necrothralls.

A translator had been found, a rheumy old man named Hotten who worked in the kitchens. His son had been a graduate of the Alchemy Institute and died early in the war.

“Now then,” Crowther said as they entered the cell. All his anger had vanished, and he was almost convincingly convivial. “Why are you so important?”

Hotten translated. Hevgotian was a low West dialect that had a folky cadence and very round-sounding words. Wagner gave a few long-winded answers that Hotten summarised after trying and failing to keep up.

“He knew Morrough in Hevgoss. Morrough was given a prison unit, sector four criminals. Wagner was a guard,” Hotten translated slowly.

The only thing Hevgoss liked more than expansionist war was their prison population. It was vast, multigenerational, and the source of their labour force and the bulk of their military. Sector four criminals were usually political prisoners, sentenced to four generations of imprisonment, lifetime after lifetime of indentured servitude that only their great-great-grandchildren would have a chance of escaping.

Labour sentences were passed down for almost any infraction, lasting anywhere from days to generations. Much of their low-ranked military was composed of sector one and two criminals, who were promised pardons in exchange for a successful military record. Whenever there were labour shortages, or rumours of political or economic instability within the country, Hevgoss had a habit of going to war, stretching their borders to encompass some new population to refill their prisons.

Officially Hevgotian prisons were all state-run, but that didn’t prevent the “rental” of prisoners when it suited them to whoever could pay. Slavery was illegal on the Northern continent, so Hevgoss had reinvented it.

“Morrough had made a deal with the militocrats. He was trying to find a way of controlling the power of life. He said that mastering it, harvesting it, was the key to immortality. He promised the leaders that he’d teach it to them if they provided him with the materials to test it, but the prisoners”—Wagner shrugged—“were resistant. They didn’t want to cooperate. They knew they would die.”

Wagner smiled as he recounted this, as though the story evoked fond memories.

“My job was to deliver the prisoners each day and take them back at night, but there were never any to take back when he was done with them. Morrough was friendly to me. He would talk to me, tell me his frustrations. The energy, you see, could not be taken by force; it had to be given willingly. He had already found many tricks to get it, but when the prisoners were dead, the energy, he said, remembered. They would lash out. Resist, so that it was difficult even for him to control.”

Helena and Crowther shared a quick glance. Clearly Crowther was also acquainted with the true story of Orion’s victory against the Necromancer.

“It was my idea that solved it.” Wagner thumped his chest. “My father, he was a warden, so was my grandfather. Prison uprisings are a dangerous thing. There are prisons the size of towns. To keep order, it is important that the guards are not the enemy. Instead, you make the prisoners think their trouble is other prisoners, a different unit or sector. Those prisoners are the reason this prisoner has less; the rules they hate are those prisoners’ fault. By making privileges always at the expense of others, the prisoners forget who has made those rules. Morrough liked this idea. To take the souls, he must make the prisoners blame someone else. Even after the energy was taken, the blame must continue to be misdirected.”

Wagner looked from Helena to Crowther, seeming to expect their awe.

“He succeeded in this, I presume,” Crowther said.

Wagner nodded. “He stopped trying to contain or bind the energy to himself. Instead he used another prisoner inside the array.” He spread his hands wide. “He had a strange alchemy. With his power, he pulled the energy out and bound them to the soul of a chosen prisoner. The other prisoner would suffer all the anger, and Morrough took the power.”

“But how would he control it,” Helena said, “if the souls—the energy is bound to someone else?”

“With his bones,” Wagner said, raising his eyebrows. “I saw it. He used his alchemy to contain all the souls inside pieces of his own bones. It was strange, but if a piece stayed with the prisoner in the array, they could not die, even if they tried. Then Morrough could keep the power.”

The phylacteries. It was exactly what Kaine had described.

“The souls of the others, they would feel that life, they would try to resist, but the prisoner could not be killed. Still … slowly their mind would—” Wagner touched the sides of his head, pulling invisible strings as though unravelling something.

“Are you saying that the Undying are just a power source for Morrough?” Helena said slowly.