Page 73 of Alchemised

His eyes fluttered closed as if he was too exhausted for the conversation. She could see the black veins even in his eyelids.

“See for yourself,” he finally said, “since you’re so determined.”

Very slowly and carefully she unfastened his cloak and lifted it off. He flinched but didn’t utter a sound. The miasma of old, fetid wounds filled the air as she unfastened the buttons of his shirt. Stepping behind him as gently as she could, she drew the clothing off his shoulders.

There were no bandages underneath. His entire back was a rotting wound, lacerated surgically from his shoulders down past his ribs.

There was an alchemical array carved into his skin.

He inhaled and she could see the white of his ribs, scored with grooves.

The incisions over his shoulders were the worst of it. Not merely cutting to the bone but into the bone, carving into his shoulder blades, a lumithium alloy welded in, bonded with the bone to keep the array intact and activated.

Whatever regenerative abilities Ferron had, it was not enough to counter an injury of this magnitude.

Arrays could be simply illustrative, to record or visually calculate a process, but they were also used for transmutation or alchemisation when the process was too complex for simple resonance manipulation, or when working with organically derived compounds that tended to be volatile.

Drawn with chalk or charcoal, or etched into a surface with a stylus.

But Helena had never seen anything like what had been done to Ferron.

“Why—” Her voice failed. “—why would they do this to you?”

“Well …” Ferron said slowly, his voice far away.

“There were lots of ideas about what to do with me—all manner of punishments were discussed for my—failure. Bennet was put out over losing his lab, all those subjects and experiments of his. He’s been wanting to experiment on one of the Undying.

He said that as the one who’d suffered the greatest loss, he should be allowed to punish me. ”

He was silent for a moment and added, “The High Necromancer says if I survive, I’ll be forgiven.”

Helena couldn’t tear her eyes away from the wound. The skin around the incisions showed signs of septicaemia. Tendrils of infection were spreading beneath his skin, leaching into his blood.

Too afraid to touch near the array, she placed her hand on his arm. He flinched at the contact. His body was still trying to regenerate, to heal the wounds that made up the array. The nerves were all intact. He had to be in an incomprehensible amount of pain.

She didn’t know where to begin, but she couldn’t just stand there looking at it. She tried to numb the area, to work inwards, but it didn’t last. Anywhere with enough living tissue to numb, his regeneration reversed it. She couldn’t even spare him the pain.

Working as close as she dared, she could feel the metal welded into his shoulders was a lumithium-titanium alloy, its resonance so sharp that Helena could feel it in her teeth. She had no idea how Ferron was even sane while having it adhered to his body.

This was beyond the scope of her abilities, more than anything had ever been before.

“I’m sorry, I can’t heal this.”

He gave a dry laugh. “I know.”

“But—” She swallowed hard, still thinking. “—I think I could help contain it, and reduce the strain it’s putting on you. It might—give you a chance of surviving. That’s the condition, right? If you survive, they won’t do anything else to you.”

Ferron gave no response.

Starting on his left shoulder, she followed the veins with her resonance, her fingertips a breath away from his skin, drawing the blood poisoning back to the incision.

Pus and blood that was nearly black trickled down across his back.

She used the corner of a handkerchief to wipe it away as gently as she could, to keep it from getting into the other wounds.

Ferron’s whole body shook, and he gave a soundless rasp.

“What are you doing?” he ground out through his teeth.

“These incisions are poisoning you. You’ve been dying and your body is pulling resources from everywhere it can to regenerate and revive you, but it’s running out of places to draw from.

This is like when you lost your arm. You couldn’t regenerate until you stopped bleeding.

If you want to recover, we have to deal with this infection and work backwards from there. ”

He dropped his head, exhaling unevenly. “How fortunate that you got such a thorough overview of my physiology while I was passed out.”

“Yes, it is,” she said curtly, and pulled out more poison.

He moaned through his teeth, his hands spasming repeatedly when the handkerchief brushed his back again.

He hadn’t even made a sound with his arm ripped off.

She paused, hands hovering.

“Would a sedative work on you?”

“No,” he said dully. “Everything wears off. I can barely get properly drunk.”

She tentatively touched the base of his skull.

“I usually work locally when blocking pain, but there’s a place here in your brain. If I stimulate it, it’ll put you to sleep. You won’t feel anything. Your body shouldn’t interpret that as tampering since I’m not blocking anything. Do you want me to try?”

“You can—” His voice caught. “You can do that?”

“Yes. I think so.”

He was silent. She watched the flutter of his ribs as he breathed unsteadily.

“Try, then, I suppose,” he said. “It’s not like there’s ever been anything stopping you from killing me.”

She ignored the comment. “You should lie down, then.”

The table was cracked down the middle, but still stable enough, so she assembled it into a makeshift bed, spreading out his cloak.

His hands trembled, gripping her shoulder as she helped him stand, and he groaned under his breath as he leaned his weight on her.

His whole body was shaking violently as he nearly collapsed onto the table.

She laced her fingers through his hair until she found the dip at the base of his skull just below the occipital protuberance.

It required only a little shift in the energy until she felt the peace of numbness flood through his body as he slipped unconscious.

She could work more easily now that Ferron wouldn’t flinch every time she touched him. She drew out the infection, wiping it away, but all she could think about was how old the injury must be.

She should have come back sooner. This was her fault: She’d assumed he’d leave the city to burn, and she’d pushed him from her mind.

She’d been so terrified he would betray them that she’d never stopped to consider what would happen if he didn’t.

Her hands trembled, hovering over the now clean wounds, as she debated what to do. She wanted to pry the metal out of his bones, but the titanium had bonded.

She gripped her amulet, desperate for any sense of reassurance.

The injury was more than merely incisions and metal transmutation. The array was active; she could feel the hum of resonance moving through it. Altering an active array was extremely dangerous. The kind of thing that cost limbs.

Attempting it might kill them both.

She had to figure out a way to make Ferron survive it, but it was rooted into him and drawing on the energy emanating from the talisman, diverting what should have been regenerating him and instead sending that power along the pathways of the array.

There was no containment circle to limit it. It was activated constantly, the symbols not acting on an external target as they would in a lab, but on Ferron. The power was being diverted, mutated, and then fed back into him in a closed loop.

That would kill a normal human, but Ferron didn’t die so easily—yet he also couldn’t change.

Helena was beginning to understand how the Undying were “immortal.” He was not ageless; his body was trapped in time, his regeneration keeping him exactly as he was.

It did not let him change, not with age or injury.

But the array was designed to change him.

The mutated power existed for the sole purpose of alteration, and that contradiction was killing him in a way far more profound than the mutilation of his back.

He was in a crucible, and he was the crucible, and he would either die terribly or be wholly alchemised into something that could survive the paradox.

She studied the symbols, trying to understand what they were intended to do.

She’d never seen an array intended to act on a person, but she was well versed in alchemical notation.

The fundamental design was a classical celestial star correlating to the eight planets. Paladians loved things in sets of five or eight. The only exception she knew was pyromancy, which the Holdfast Suncrest was modelled after. Which used seven.

The use of the notation carved into Ferron’s skin was like using an alchemical formula to express a literary concept.

It wasn’t unheard of for alchemists to write with alchemical symbolism and symbols, particularly in textbooks as a way of restricting information to the educated, but Helena had never seen the method applied to a functioning array.

Each of the eight points had a distinct concept using combinations of symbols. Helena parsed the meaning slowly.

Calculating, Cunning, Devoted, Determined, Ruthless, Unfailing, Unhesitating, and Unyielding.

It made sense that an array on a person couldn’t be a typical transmutation formula, but the idea of forging traits into a human was horrific. If it worked, it would carve Ferron down into these eight compounding qualities, potentially erasing everything else about him.

He would have kept healing at least until the metal had been welded into place. The lacerations were all interconnected to make the array continuous. Given the way Ferron reacted when she offered to knock him out, he’d probably been conscious the entire time.

Her fingers trembled, and she laid her hand over his. His skin was cold and papery thin.