Page 6 of Alchemised

Stroud’s dry, hard fingers wrapped around her wrist. Helena felt a brief tingle of Stroud’s resonance before all sensation from hand to elbow vanished and her body went limp with paralysis.

Without explanation or warning, Stroud plucked something out of the case.

It gleamed in the light, revealing the bulbous handle and long pointed spike of an awl.

With practised ease, Stroud drove the tip straight through Helena’s wrist. Helena felt nothing, but her throat closed, stomach inverting as she watched Stroud work the awl in slow circles as it sank between the bones, the tip emerging on the other side.

When Stroud pulled it out, there was a drop of blood on the tip and a hole running straight through Helena’s wrist. The wound was bloodless, all the torn skin, muscle, and broken vessels instantly closing in the process.

Setting the awl aside, Stroud manipulated Helena’s hand, bending and arching it back, checking for range of motion. Sensation returned, but the paralysis lingered.

“Nerves and veins are all intact,” Stroud said, letting go.

Helena could do nothing but watch as Shiseo stepped over and pushed a tiny, notched tube through the hole now running through her wrist until the ends protruded on each side. The moment the tube slipped into place, the blurred sense of resonance in Helena’s left hand vanished completely.

It was as if one of her senses had been ripped out.

She could feel the tube inside her, a deadening sense of inertia emanating from it.

Shiseo pulled out a ribbon of metal. It was smooth and shining on one side, grooved on the other.

He slid the groove over one notched end of the tube before wrapping the ribbon around her wrist and sliding it over the other, locking the tube in place before he wrapped the rest of the metal ribbon around and around.

He inspected the tension and fit, lined up all the layers, and with little more than a flick of his fingers, the layers morphed into a solid ring of metal, perfectly fitted.

No lock, no way to open it without resonance.

Shiseo slid a strangely shaped wire into a tiny opening on the old cuff. A mechanism inside clicked, and it fell off.

He picked it up as if it were a curious antique and put it in his case before moving around to Helena’s right side.

Helena grasped desperately at her dim sense of remaining resonance, trying to focus, to remember the sensation of who and what she was, knowing it would be gone in minutes.

Shiseo was just removing the second old manacle when the door opened and a guard entered.

“Warden Mandl.”

A woman in uniform strode into the room with a quick, confident step that faltered when her eyes landed on Helena.

She had a wide mouth, and it dropped open in shock.

“What did you do to this prisoner, Mandl?” Morrough asked. He had disappeared back into the shadows, but his voice emerged, even more dangerous now.

Mandl flung herself prostrate, disappearing from Helena’s range of vision.

“Your Eminence …” Her pleading voice rose from the floor.

“I saved you from the Holdfasts and the Faith. Saved all the necromancers and vivimancers like you who lived like rats fearing the Eternal Flame’s punishment for your ‘unnatural gifts.’ I let you ascend above those who had sought to subdue you. Now I learn you betrayed me?”

“No! It was not a betrayal! I am loyal. Loyal to our cause, and loyal to you! It was my foolish desire for vengeance—I confess it. I wanted her to suffer. But I would never betray you.”

“Explain yourself.”

Mandl pushed herself up, still kneeling, her head bowed but her voice shaking with emotion. “She is a traitor to vivimancers! She tormented me! Thought herself better than me for having been a part of the Holdfasts’ Institute, her vivimancy blessed by the Eternal Flame. She had to be punished!”

Helena stared at the woman in dazed bewilderment.

“You tampered with a prisoner and her records out of—jealousy?” Stroud looked astonished. “Why didn’t you report her abilities?”

Mandl shrank back. “I feared that she would be favoured if it was known. That you might find her useful and not punish her as she deserved to be punished.”

Stroud leaned over her. “And what kind of punishment did you think she deserved?”

Mandl swallowed nervously. “I—left her conscious—in the stasis tank. I intended to return. I wanted her to be trapped, knowing and dreading what I would do to her, but then I was assigned to the Outpost and selected for ascendance. I was afraid my temporary lapse in judgement would disappoint, so I did not disclose it. But I would never betray our great cause!”

“She has been in that warehouse for the fourteen months since you were reassigned. Why are there no records?” Stroud sounded highly sceptical.

“I’d intended to complete her records once I was—done with her. When I left, I assumed she would die and then no one would ever know. Forgive me! I did nothing else, I swear it.” Mandl flung herself back down onto the floor.

“I see now I have been too generous,” Morrough said. His nightmarish face and looming eye sockets emerged from the shadows. He tilted his head as though staring down at Mandl. “You were not worthy of my gift.”

“Please! Your Eminence, I beg of you—give me—”

Mandl stopped speaking as she was jerked up onto her feet by an unseen force. The front of her grey uniform tore open as her ribs unfurled in a gush of blood, her chest rent apart.

Helena’s skin crawled, terror slithering like a worm through her gut as the warm wet smell of fresh blood and exposed organs permeated the room. There was a sensation like a hum in the air that she could feel all the way into her own lungs.

But Mandl, split open as she was, was not dead.

Her hands rose up, and she tried to claw her ribs closed with one hand and ward off Morrough with the other, her exposed lungs pulsing. “Another chance—please! I will not fail you! I swear. You will not regret it.”

“No, you will not fail me again,” Morrough said, his rasping voice almost gentle as he reached into Mandl’s open chest, fingers sliding beneath her lungs and extracting a gleaming piece of metal from somewhere near her heart.

Little tendrils of viscera were wrapped around it, clinging to both the metal and Morrough’s fingers as it was torn free.

When it came loose, Mandl’s body dropped to the ground. Silent. Dead.

Morrough gave a low sigh and seemed to shrink momentarily as he stood, cradling the metal in his hand. Through the blood, the piece had a sharp, bright, lumithium gleam.

He gestured with his other hand. A necrothrall crawled from the shadows like an animal.

It was a young woman in the early stages of necrosis, still wearing the tattered remains of the Eternal Flame’s hospital uniform.

Her expression was blank. A rip in the uniform exposed a chest latticed with blackening veins.

When the corpse reached Morrough, she stood, and he shoved the metal piece into her. There was a soft crunch of breaking bone that left a hole purpled with old blood in the centre of her chest.

The corpse-woman shuddered, and then her expression morphed, the blankness vanishing.

She stumbled and gave a wild screeching moan as she looked down at her blackened fingers and deteriorating body.

“No! Please, no—it wasn’t my—”

“Do not fail me again, Mandl,” Morrough said, “and in time perhaps I will permit you a better reliquary. Perhaps your original.”

He gestured at Mandl’s corpse on the floor.

The air hummed again as his fingers curled, and the ribs closed.

Mandl’s body stood. The front of the uniform was ripped open, exposing her, and she was covered in blood.

The skin knit back together, but her face showed nothing.

The corpse-woman fell to the floor moaning and pleading, clawing at the oozing wound in the middle of her chest as if trying to rip the metal back out while Morrough walked back towards Helena.

Stroud kicked Mandl. “Thank the High Necromancer for his mercy in allowing you a vivimancer’s corpse, and a return to the Outpost, Warden.”

The corpse-woman gave one last guttural moan and struggled to her feet.

“Thank you, Your Eminence,” she rasped, and stumbled from the room.

Stroud joined Morrough, appearing unfazed by what had transpired.

“Is it possible for someone to survive fourteen months in stasis?” Stroud asked.

Morrough said nothing, but the nervous, perspiring man spoke up from where he’d been cowering against the wall. “Ac-Actually that idea does have some potential,” he said, stepping forward and then shrinking back as Morrough’s eyeless attention turned to him.

He adjusted the collar on his shirt several times.

“Our good friend from the Far East”—he gestured towards Shiseo, who was absorbed in cleaning his awl—“mentioned that the suppression she was wearing was an old model, without a complete resonance block. Perhaps that explains both her mind— and her survival.”

Stroud’s eyes narrowed. “How?”

“The transmutation done to her isn’t something another person could do. Those memories are too deeply enmeshed with her mind. However, if you had someone capable of such complexity—a healer, as our friend says she was—perhaps she …”

“You’re saying she did this to herself?” Stroud gestured towards Helena with scathing disbelief.

He choked on his saliva. “Well—it seems the most likely explanation. In my opinion.” His face was gleaming with perspiration.

Stroud sucked on her teeth. “And the survival?”

“She—did not let herself die. Per-Perhaps a low level of internalised resonance in a competent healer would provide a sufficient means of self-sustenance when ordinarily a body would perish under such conditions.”

“That’s absurd!” Stroud snapped.

“That is immaterial. Can we recover the memories?” Morrough said. “The Eternal Flame would not go to such lengths unless the information was of vital importance.”