Alchemised: A Novel, page 14
She tried to talk but the muscles on the right side of her jaw were still so tight, she could scarcely part her teeth. She pressed her face into the warmth of the hand, wanting to cry.
She felt so cold, as if something poisonous was spreading through her, freezing her solid. A low, gasping sound emerged from the back of her throat.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t remember—
“Who are you?” she slurred through her teeth.
Myriad emotions flashed across his face. He opened his mouth, then shut it firmly.
“I’m in charge of your care,” he finally said very slowly, saying each word precisely. His hand slid across the side of her neck, making her tremble. His fingertips touched the dip at the base of her skull. “Go to sleep. You’ll remember when you wake.”
Helena wanted answers, not sleep, but the warmth seeped under her skin like water. The room blurred, the edges disappearing. The face softening as it faded away.
“Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed.
“I suppose you do.”
WHEN SHE WOKE AGAIN, SHE did remember, and she was screaming. Her mind was aflame with fever. She veered in and out of lucidity. Sometimes remembering transference, other times lost and confused.
Run away.
She was supposed to run away, to go somewhere. But she needed—something.
She wouldn’t go without it.
In the middle of the night, she wandered outside into the courtyard, icy rain pouring from the sky, searching. She lay on the ground, trying to make her head cool from the fire raging inside it. If her mind were cool, she’d remember what she was looking for.
“What are you doing? You’re freezing yourself to death, you idiot.” Ferron carried her inside.
Her skin was so cold that even the servants’ dead hands burned as they stripped off her wet clothes.
When they finally left her, she tried to get back out, but the door and windows were locked fast. Eventually they bound her to the bed so she would stop clawing her fingers raw on the door, trying to escape.
She was left, trapped, forced to endure the lurid, blood-drenched nightmares as she burned away.
Every time she closed her eyes she was at the Institute, bright and golden and gleaming as it had once been, hurrying up the Tower steps for a class, her textbooks pressed tight against her chest, Luc ambling beside her. There was someone else with them, but even her dreams flinched away from the face.
Then Helena would blink or look down to take notes, and when she looked again, the world would be in ruins. All the students slumped over in their seats, cut open, their blood spattered across the room. Helena the lone survivor amid the carnage.
In one dream, Penny was laid out on a medical table, strapped down and screaming as faceless figures vivisected her before the assembly of dead students.
In another, it was Ferron at the front of the room as if called up for a demonstration. He stood there, morphing steadily from a dark-haired boy into a pale silvery nightmare, his colour turning into blood that dripped from his hands.
When the fever broke, Helena’s limbs had atrophied again. She had no idea how much time had passed. She stumbled and trembled like a kitten when she walked. It was as if the synapses in her brain were misaligned.
She was grateful that Ferron did not come and harass her about going outside. She didn’t want to see him again because she had a very clear memory of pressing her face against his hand without any idea of who he was.
In charge of her care? A very generous way of describing himself.
She paused, replaying the interaction. His slow enunciation as he’d answered her question. She’d been speaking in Etrasian.
As she recovered, she kept having dreams about Luc, memories. Not forgotten ones but moments from the past that made her chest ache at their recollection.
“Come on,” Luc whispered after finding her studying in the library, “you’ve been in here for two days. You’re going to start growing mushrooms out of your ears.” He tugged one of them teasingly. “You need sunshine. I need sunshine.”
“I need to finish analysing this array structure,” she hissed, trying to elbow him away as he began stealing her pens. “Go away.”
Luc never went away no matter how she threatened him. He’d mope and sulk, making progressively more and more noise until the librarians ordered Helena to take him outside, as though the next Principate were a recalcitrant pet.
When they were older and she’d started doing lab work, he couldn’t just make noise to disrupt her, so instead he’d threaten to go off and get into trouble, and hadn’t she promised his father to keep him out of trouble?
They would go into the city, and he’d show her all the best places. The prettiest fire chapels and immense perihelion cathedrals, hidden water gardens, little bookstores and cafés.
All the towers and gardens and views of Paladia that she had ever loved, she had known because Luc had shown them to her. She had loved the city through his eyes. She wished she’d given in more often.
When Helena finally managed to leave her room again, her mind played tricks on her. The house seemed wrong somehow, different from what she remembered. The light was from the wrong angles, the windows in the wrong places, doors where they shouldn’t be.
“The brain inflammation is much better this time,” Stroud said when she came to examine Helena. Her resonance was moving beneath the surface of Helena’s skull like a worm. “I don’t like that you had a seizure again, but only one is an improvement. I think a monthly schedule will be about right.”
Stroud was barely gone when Ferron arrived and stood at the foot of her bed, hands clasped behind his back, studying her through languid eyes.
“Did you know it’s nearly solstice?” he said at last.
No. She had no idea of the date. She knew there was a month between transference sessions, but she hadn’t been sure of when she’d arrived.
The winter solstice marked the end of the year in the North. It was one of the most significant events of their calendar. Southern coastal countries, where the days did not ebb and grow so dramatically, tracked the year by Lumithia’s lunar tides.
“You were supposed to be gone by now.” His eyes flicked towards the window. “Seems I’ll be keeping you through the winter.”
There was no emotion in Ferron’s voice or face as he said it. It was one of the things that Helena realised was most strange about him: how little his body and tone communicated at times.
Etras had an animated culture and language, using expressions and hand gestures. It had been one of the many things that had made Helena a clear outsider. She’d learned to lace her fingers tightly together under the desk when speaking in class or else risk the room rippling with laughter as her hands started gesticulating.
Paladians valued stillness. Expert alchemists would only move their fingers for precise and controlled use of their resonance. It was culturally ingrained. Expressions were also valued most when they were subtle; insults often came in the form of sarcastic flattery that didn’t translate easily for a newcomer.
Helena had learned to be still and watch for subtle tells. To understand that when the pupils got small, and the eyes skipped over her face, and the feet pointed away, that the smiling and nice-sounding words didn’t mean that she was liked or her presence wanted.
Ferron was more difficult to read than most Paladians, not because his mouth said one thing and his body another, but because his body sometimes didn’t say anything at all.
He stood there, body still, expression flat, hands concealed. Helena couldn’t work out his mood.
“There are a few things scheduled to arrive tomorrow, to spare myself any additional inconvenience from all this. Please”—he placed overt emphasis on the word—“do not mistake it for a sign of affection.”
A PAPER PACKAGE WAS LEFT at her door along with the breakfast tray the next morning. Inside was a pair of boots.
She pulled them out, running her fingers over the details.
They were beautiful, gleaming leather, with sturdy soles and a row of buttons to fasten them up. She could see the craftsmanship in all the details.
When Ferron had referred to something sparing himself “additional inconvenience,” she had not expected shoes, although the slippers were in tatters from the wet gravel.
She slipped her feet into them, already looking forward to walking the halls without the ice-cold iron in the floors seeping through her feet.
It was then she realised there was more in the package. A pair of shearling gloves made with an odd design, very long in the wrist. Not formal length, but strangely proportioned, rather like a hawking glove.
She pulled one on curiously and realised the shape and length was to cover the manacles, preventing the metal from growing frigid and burning her skin.
When she went out for her walk, it was the first time her hands and feet didn’t begin immediately aching from the cold.
Still she refused to feel any gratitude towards Ferron. It would only get colder after the solstice passed. If she was there all winter, she’d probably develop nerve damage or frostbite from going outside. It was in his best interest to keep her healthy.
She was not so foolish as to mistake calculation for kindness.
CHAPTER 10
HELENA SAT BY THE WINDOW IN HER room, trying and failing to make out any sense of resonance in her fingers. If she focused very intensely, sometimes she thought there was still a glimmer of it.
She stood and went to the window. The days were short and terribly dark, sunsets at midday.
She closed her hand into a fist, eyes shut, concentrating, and then flexed her fingers, pressing them against the window’s icy iron lattice, straining until her eyes blurred.
Nothing.
She fidgeted with the manacle around her wrist until the spike between her wrist bones twinged in warning.
Despite centuries of alchemical study, there was still much unknown about resonance.
Prior to the Faith, there had been a cult of alchemy devoted to a masculine version of Lumithia.
The cult claimed that mankind itself was the first product of the alchemy, created by Sol at the beginning of time and scattered across the earth. However, the human beings created were lowly and corruptible, much like the most ignoble of metals, and Sol for all his power could not make them better. Then came Lumen, whose alchemical processes were much harsher. Lumen joined together the other four elements of fire, earth, water, and air, using the entire earth as an alembic, with the creatures of earth as the prima materia. The Great Disaster, two millennia past, which nearly shattered both earth and humanity, had been the processes of alchemisation itself.
First the fires that rained upon the earth: the calcination. The rising tides that swallowed the great cities were the dissolution. The earthquakes that shattered even the mountains were the separation. The aftermath as the survivors emerged from the destruction: the conjunction. The plagues and sickness and starvation that followed: the fermentation. The death toll, so immense that humanity nearly blinked from existence: the distillation. And finally in culmination, the result of Lumen’s great experiment, mankind itself manifesting alchemical resonance was the coagulation.
This process was the method of alchemisation that Cetus’s early writings referred to.
The Faith and the Institute both rejected the cult almost entirely, although they did accept Lumen as Lumithia, and acknowledge her as one of the elemental deities in the Quintessence. However, the Faith held a strict view that resonance was not a reflection of spiritual purity but merely an expression of it. All humans were flawed, alchemist or not, and therefore all humans must strive towards purification. A step which Cetus conveniently left out of his alchemical process.
Additionally, it wasn’t difficult to predict where large numbers of alchemists would appear. It was correlated with regions that had large lumithium deposits. The Northern continent’s largest mine was in the mountains, upriver from Paladia, and the number of children with measurable resonance born in the city was more than double the rates of neighbouring countries.
Paladia’s lumithium mines had made for complicated politics. Lumithium could only be safely excavated by those without resonance; otherwise the symptoms and wasting sickness came quickly. But the work was limited to a single generation. Miners’ children were almost always born with measurable resonance. Paladia was constantly bringing in new labourers to work the mines, resulting in a perpetual population explosion. That was the reason for the city-state’s incredible density.
The guilds depended on lumithium for processing, but they disliked the competition that mining created. The Alchemy Institute had been at maximum capacity for decades, which functioned as a limit on the number of alchemy certificates in any given year. Without certification, people could not professionally call themselves alchemists or use their resonance without a credentialled supervisor.
The guilds wanted the certification and admissions of the Alchemy Institute to remain limited, both because it increased the value of their credentials, and because those without formal certification were cheap to hire for alchemical factory work. However, the guilds also wanted assurance that their heirs would be the ones entering the Institute, no matter whose resonance or aptitude was greater.
It had created a perpetual cycle of grievances in which everyone found the current circumstances unfair, but no one would agree to a solution. Principate Helios had tried for decades, and it had resulted in mass riots and labour strikes.
The Undying had seemingly solved the mining issue by using necrothralls, avoiding both lumithium shortages and exponential competition, which made for bitter irony: The war had so decimated the alchemist population that now they needed a breeding program to revive it.
She squinted, trying to see the tube running through her wrist more clearly, to work out what it was. It appeared to be encased in ceramic. Which might mean it was breakable, although more likely it meant the metal was corrosive.
Lumithium wasn’t corrosive, though. It was categorically noble, an incorruptible metal, less perfect than gold but superior to silver, which tarnished. Perhaps a lumithium alloy?
She couldn’t think of many lumithium alloys, though, as it was predominantly used in the emanations needed to increase or stabilise the resonance of other metals.
She suspected that the resonance suppression was some kind of Eastern alchemy. The Eastern Empire was very secretive of their alchemy, and Shiseo had been the one who’d put the manacles on her.
While she was still scrutinising, the door opened. She glanced over, expecting Ferron, but found a stranger staring at her, his face alight.
He slipped in, shutting the door softly, looking around, as if he expected to be immediately stopped. When nothing happened, a slow smile spread across his face.
He came towards Helena on quick, quiet steps.
He was solidly built, with wheat-coloured hair and a square face. He was dressed in a deep-blue frock coat and cape that had geometric embroidery decorating it, and a deep-burgundy cravat at his throat.
Helena’s instinctive response to the sight of him was absolute terror.
It had never occurred to her that a stranger might one day walk into the room. Her hands spasmed, sending a shock of pain up her arms.
He paused.
“You don’t remember me,” he said in disbelief. There was a hint of offence in the way he said it, as if she should know him instantly.
Helena studied him wildly, trying to guess at who he could be. His voice was vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d heard it.
His expression grew eager, triumphant as he got closer. His hand extended, fingers curved and grasping.
The door slammed open so abruptly the room seemed to jolt.
“Lose your way, Lancaster?” Ferron said as he entered, his eyes burning an irate silver.
A flood of relief rushed through Helena.
Lancaster straightened instantly, the hurried shiftiness falling away as he pivoted to face Ferron, giving a careless shrug. Ferron passed him without a glance.
“Just exploring this mansion of yours,” he said. “Got curious when I saw her.”
He nodded towards Helena just as Ferron stepped between them. Helena shrank towards Ferron without thinking, so close she could smell the scent of juniper on his clothes.
“She’s not available for entertainment,” Ferron said, his voice chilly. “You’ll have to find someone else to amuse yourself with. I’m sure you’ll manage.”
Lancaster laughed. “But you got her in the papers and everything.” He pouted. “Surely you allow her visitors?”
“No, I don’t,” Ferron said after giving Helena a perfunctory glance. “And in the future, if you’re curious about something of mine, you may ask. We should return to the party. I imagine Aurelia misses us.”
He rested a gloved hand on Lancaster’s shoulder and steered him firmly towards the door. Lancaster glanced back at Helena, the intensity returning to his eyes, as if there was something he was trying desperately to communicate to her.
Helena watched him vanish through the doorway, trying to place the name.
Lancaster.
A guild name. Nickel. Yes, the nickel guild. There’d been a Lancaster in her year, or perhaps the year above? Erik Lancaster.
Why would he expect Helena to recognise him?
As she stood wondering over this, the faint sound of music drifted through the closed door.
It dawned on her then why there was someone in the house. The Ferrons were hosting a solstice eve party.
She had no idea they hosted anything. The parts of the house she’d seen were so dirty, she’d be embarrassed to admit guests. However, the hibernal solstice was one of Paladia’s most significant holidays, and given how closely the summer solstice was tied to the Holdfasts, it was probably the only major holiday the Undying were still allowed to celebrate.
She went to the door. Despite the danger, she was burning with curiosity. She knew there’d be Undying and liches present. Anyone invited would be an Aspirant or at least supportive of the regime.
